🎧🍌 Lessons Selling Two Startups, Crash Course on Govtech + Drones with Rahul Sidhu
Two exits in 17 months, a playbook for selling to government, what most people get wrong about the police, what it's like testifying to Congress, and Rahul's favorite investors
In last week’s episode, Paul Klein said you should never talk to the cops. But that’s exactly what I did.
This week’s episode is with Rahul Sidhu, co-founder of SPIDRTech and Aerodome (and former cop), two companies in the public safety space.
He’s sold both of them, and our conversation unpacks all the lessons he learned, what he did differently with his second company Aerodome, and why he sold to Flock Safety only 17 months after starting it (he did NOT plan on selling).
Rahul shares his playbook for selling to police, the government, how he met Nikita Bier in high school (who’s been his most helpful investor), and why he’s still bullish on drones, robotics, and AI in the physical world.
Timestamps to jump in:
4:07 What its like testifying to Congress
8:06 Why 90% of what he knew about police was wrong
13:15 How to sell to police departments
15:24 His first business selling WoW accounts
19:00 Meeting Nikita Bier in high school
21:29 Starting SPIDRTech to improve police + community relationships
27:45 Two biggest mistakes building SPIDR
31:47 How startups break down when scaling
34:19 Selling SPIDR instead of raising a Series B
40:12 Why Aerodome was so much easier to start
42:55 Why Rahul loves unsexy markets with founder market fit
46:03 Starting Aerodome, drones as first responders
53:39 Building a capital efficient hardware startup
56:46 How regulatory changes made an opening for Aerodome
1:00:13 Inside Aerodome’s Series A
1:03:57 Selling Aerodome to Flock Safety within 17 months
1:09:31 Saying “would I work for this team?” when getting acquired
1:14:35 Seeing a homeless guy in an Aerodome shirt
1:17:02 The massive Robotics + AI opportunity this decade
1:21:42 What’s really happening with drones in New Jersey
Referenced:
Find Rahul on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
👉 Find on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube
Transcript - (read on Rev)
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Rahul, welcome to the show.
Rahul Sidhu:
Thanks, man. Good to be here.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I'm excited to have you. I know you used to be a comedian way back in the day. And people have been telling me the show has been pretty dry, so maybe this one will be a little more exciting.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, I've watched your show. It's not funny at all. I didn't laugh once, but I will try to make the audience enjoy the show more than they might've done previously.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I mean, that's actually a pretty high bar. Some of the episodes have been pretty good and people have been telling me. So that's the most common feedback I get is, "Wow, it's actually pretty good." Kind of like, "I expected it to be bad, but it surprised me."
Rahul Sidhu:
I wasn't going to expect it to be bad. I actually thought it was great. I've watched your content on social media. I'm like, "Oh, this guy's funny and he's bringing a type of energy to venture capital that everyone else is either too afraid or doesn't have the social skills to bring." So I'm excited to do this particular podcast. It's going to be more fun than the other ones.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I kind of describe it as edutainment. I know we were talking about that earlier. But I like to make it interesting for people, but also you learn something. And I know we're going to talk, I don't know, a bit about navigating selling to police government drones.
Rahul Sidhu:
Hilarious topics, yes.
Turner Novak:
Yes, exactly. Very serious, but also they're probably kind of funny. I'm sure there's some good... I know you have some good stories.
Well, I think one of the most interesting things, probably the biggest thing I wanted to ask you was you've testified in front of Congress before. What is that like?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. So look, when you testify in front of Congress, there's usually only a couple reasons. One of them is like you're in trouble, and the other one is like you're just there to educate Congress about a particular topic. The stress profile is there's a chasm between these two things. And luckily, I was in the latter. I wasn't in any trouble. They just wanted to talk about drones and public safety, and it was the Homeland Security Committee that wanted to talk about it.
So it was an interesting experience. We met with a couple folks on the panel beforehand, and I knew most of the other people that were also testifying with me. But the hard part about testifying was that I was sick the entire time. I rarely get sick. And I've maybe a handful of times in my life gotten sick where I had a persistent cough, and it just so happened this one moment I had that. And I knew people were going to tune in from whatever C-span thing, like friends and family, and I was sitting there the whole time and I was stifling a cough. It was trying so hard not to cough in the middle of my answers.
There's this one really funny photo that someone from my company took and turned it into a meme in the Slack channel. It's constantly posted. And it's me drinking water while testifying in front of Congress, and I look like I'm struggling so much, like it was the hardest moment of my life. So if anything, I'm just glad that meme exists now because it's going to get me through a lot of the hard parts of my life where I can just post that as like, "This is what it felt like to be there in that moment." But I would say it was a great experience. And as long as you're not testifying to get in trouble, it's worthwhile. It's worth doing.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I've definitely had some of those before where you're in some kind of high pressure situation and you're maybe sick, almost sick, and you're doing the coughing thing and you're trying to restrain the cough and you're just sweating and you're constantly drinking water and you run out. And you're just trying to not talk, but you have to talk at the same time.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, yeah. It's not easy. I was sweating, for sure.
Turner Novak:
So what all goes into that? It is kind a learning experience, I guess, so it wasn't that high stakes. What do you do? Do you get there an hour early? Do you have to like, is just sitting around? What's it like?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. I mean, look, I don't live in DC so I got there the night before. I had somebody come prep me. It was the person... Well, I'll just put it this way because I can't say the person, but he was in charge of prepping a particular either vice presidential or presidential candidate for debates this year. And that person did well in the debate, so it's like he came and he helped me understand, "Okay, this is what's going to happen. These are the types of questions you're likely to answer." A little team that was briefing me.
I had to submit a statement ahead of time that I was going to read in front of everybody. And then after that it's just Q&A. The congressional members have questions they're going to ask. And you don't really know what they're going to ask, so you just hope for the best. The one thing they told me is like, "Just simplify. This is not a tech podcast. Don't go into the weeds of any particular thing. Just give simple answers."
Most of the reason people testify in front of Congress when they're not in trouble or there's not this big televised hearing is just to establish a level of expertise in DC like, "Hey, this person knows what they're talking about. They've testified in front of the Homeland Security Committee or whatever about this particular thing." And then it helps you kind of build relationships on the Hill a little bit more effectively. So that's kind of the reason to do it.
Turner Novak:
Okay. It's a contrast to some of the big tech CEO hearings, like the TikTok CEO hearing where they're like, "Can you control our Wi-Fi with TikTok?" And he's like, "No, we can't do that. What kind of a question is that?"
Rahul Sidhu:
One of my buddies actually was like, "I'll give you a thousand dollars if while you're testifying you can say, "No, Senator. I'm from Singapore' at some point in the middle of it." And I was like, "Nah, it's not worth it." There was definitely a number where I might've thought about it. It wasn't a thousand dollars, but it would've been good.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that would've been like souring the rest of your federal contracts.
Rahul Sidhu:
Oh, it would have ruined my career potentially.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Rahul Sidhu:
So there's a number, but it wasn't a thousand dollars.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, and so you used to be a police officer. I know that's kind of how you got in this whole world. What do most people not know about the police?
Rahul Sidhu:
We are just human beings like everybody else. I think that's one thing that people don't think about. They see a uniform and they view the police as a consequence. A police officer's walking up to your adrenaline tends to spike. Even me as a police officer, I'd be driving around and a cop would pull me over and I would get a little nervous and I'd be like, "Well, why am I getting nervous? I'm a cop. I know how this works. It's not that big of a deal."
There's plenty of people don't know about the police, like how they do their job. One thing I'll say is, I wasn't the most pro-police person growing up. I grew up in Harbor City, LAP jurisdiction. Not the greatest neighborhood. I didn't have great interactions with police and neither did my friends. It was like a 100% minority neighborhood and we just didn't have the best interactions.
And then I worked as a paramedic for a period of time, and then I had some pretty bad interactions even as a paramedic on duty with the police that I can talk about. One in particular that I was like, "Man, I really just don't like cops," my fire chief at the time or rescue chief was like, "Hey, I'm sick and tired of hearing you complain about cops. Put your money where your mouth is. Go be one if you think you can do the job better." And I was like, "Oh, sure." I'm in my early 20s, I'm like, "Yeah, I'll do it." And then I went and became a cop in LA and realized I was wrong about 90% of what I thought it took to be a police officer and what the job was like, et cetera. It was probably the most humbling experience of my life.
So if I, someone who was a first responder thought all these things about the police ended up being wrong, I got to imagine the average public ends up being wrong about what it is to be a police officer and decision-making process and how the job actually works. So it's a humbling experience. Do a ride-along. Anybody should do a ride-along and you'll learn along.
Turner Novak:
And what is a ride-along for someone who doesn't know? That's when you just sit in the back or the front seat of a cop car and they just drive through the city?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. You can generally go to your local police department and say, "Hey, I'd like to schedule ride-along." And you can sit next to a cop for the entirety of their shift and go to 911 calls with them and do all kinds of things and learn from the front seat what it feels like to be in that position. They'll keep you from harm's way. You're not going to go and chase after bad guys, but you're going to be in the mix. I had a couple of those experiences that changed my mind a little bit early on. Obviously, nothing changes your mind like putting a gun on your belt and then being the person that's in charge of making life-saving decision, but it was a good experience.
Turner Novak:
When you talk about the 90% different than what you thought, anything that stands out of like, "I did a 180 on this or a 540"? Like a full spin in all the way back again.
Rahul Sidhu:
I think you can simplify it to you think that you know how someone should react in a high pressure situation. And that's where I got a lot of confidence because I was a paramedic and I'm like, "I deal with high pressure situations all day. How bad could this be?" But what I didn't understand is not every high pressure situation is the same.
When you're a person who might have to utilize violence to solve a problem versus just someone who's like, "Oh, I just choose what medications to give this person," you have to be very, not only thoughtful about how to do that in the most ethical and practical way, but you have to make that decision often with little to no information in a split second. And that feeling knowing that whatever you decide in that exact moment, no matter how much training you have, this dynamic scenario, you will be judged by a jury potentially even if all of your intentions were pure, that feeling is very, very difficult to master. And that hesitation you might build because you're so worried about how you do that could go from productive, like, "I want someone to be a little worried, of course," to unproductive, "And now I'm hesitating and someone died because I didn't decide fast enough because I was so worried about how people would judge me after this exact moment."
That's something I didn't realize how crippling that could be and how you have to get really good at pushing past that and just making the best decision you can.
Turner Novak:
And you never know when those moments are going to come up, right? Like 99.9% of the time you're just kind of nothing is really... It's lower stakes. You're just going through the motions, whatever. And then all of a sudden it's like someone might die and I have to make a decision in a quarter of a second.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. I mean, you'll be sitting in a police car and sitting on your phone potentially in a parking lot and you're just checking Instagram real quick and all of a sudden some guy starts banging on your window and you're like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" And then you open the door and you're like, "Hey, back up. Back up." And you can't see what this guy's got in his hands, but he's raising it up. And you went from Instagram to like, "I've got a gun in my hand. I might shoot this guy in five seconds." That's just the reality of policing in America. It's just that you have this type of situation that you have to be rapidly prepared for and execute on, and it has to be second nature to you.
Turner Novak:
So I know this kind of gets into what you're doing, and I don't want to dive into Aerodome and Flock too quickly, but I definitely want to get there. But what kind of tools do the police use to do their job better? And what's a good way to think about what kind of problems are going through and trying to serve them?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, look, I mean there's an overlap between every other industry and public safety, right? I mean, you're talking about customers who have certain types of problems and workflows and you can utilize technology to optimize those workflows or increase the outcomes or save that customer money. All those things are still largely the same.
The difference comes down to a few things, like number one, making tools for a police officer to go out there and improve the likelihood of an investigation or even make their life, their job safer. That's unfortunately not as important as I would've thought to financial decision makers sometimes. That's interesting and you can make some money doing that, but there are limited venture outcomes in that.
When you go out to a city though and you say, "Hey, not only is it making this police officer's jobs safer, potentially increasing outcomes, but it's also saving you money and it's also decreasing the likelihood of a bad community police interaction and deescalation." It's now starting to hit financial talking points and political talking points. And now all of a sudden you've got the police chief who wants this particular technology is able to go to city council fairly simply and potentially ask for that money because you've checked a bunch of boxes that are very city council-friendly. And that's an interesting thing you don't really think about.
When you sell to businesses, you just go, "Hey, look, here's the decision maker. We can go pretty quick. Here's the outcome. Here's how much it costs and here's how much it costs if you didn't have this. Here's your ROI." And then a CFO goes, "Yeah, it makes sense. Cool. Check mark. Let's go." In this scenario, it's a lot more complicated. And the procurement process is government, which could add to the complication and regulatory hurdles to get to a sale. So you have to think very strategically about that. That's something I learned over my time building for public safety.
Turner Novak:
And the first idea that you had, the first business that you built was SPIDR Tech? Is that how you pronounce it? Am I saying that right?
Rahul Sidhu:
Actually, the first business I built was in high school.
Turner Novak:
Oh really? What was that?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, it was a World of Warcraft business.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Yep. I played that a little bit.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, that game just came out and I watched everyone in my high school get really addicted to this game, including members of the football team and people I played sports with, and I'm like, "Wow, this is an epidemic of World of Warcraft." And so I tried playing it and I'm like, "Okay, I kind of get it," but then I got bored with it. You know that game, the audience who doesn't know that game, you level your character to like, at that time it was level 60, and then you're kind of like, "Okay, cool. I built this great character. I can kind of do a few things." But then most people are like, "Now what do I do?" and they quit. And they'll spend three to six months building this character. And then at the end of it, they've got nothing. They're just like, "Okay, I leave." And they put all their time and effort into it.
So what I did is I went around and said, "Hey, if you've leveled your character and you're looking to quit, I'll give you a hundred bucks for your character." That way it's better than $0 in quitting. And almost everybody would say yes. And then I'd buy that character from them. And then I turn around to someone online who didn't want to spend three to six month loving a character and I'd sell it to them for 500 bucks.
I started with the kids in my high school. And then I just started building a brokerage on the internet, and it was one of the world's first World of Warcraft brokerages. And then I spun that business up enough to buy stupid things when I was 18, 19 and pay my way through college and stuff like that. But that was my first foray into, you could call it a tech business, but it was just a little play around money.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I feel like there's a couple other businesses like, people would mine gold. They'd sell gold to the...
Rahul Sidhu:
Dude, Brock Pierce did that. Brock Pierce, if you know who Brock Pierce is, he's the chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. This is actually really funny. One of his first businesses was a company called IGE, where they would basically farm digital currency in games, like mining gold like you just said. And I remember I was friends with him at the time, we haven't talked in a long time, but I would get some of his gold and put in my accounts and I would do this little thing with him. Early on we were friends on Facebook and he was like, "Hey, this Bitcoin thing's going to be big one day." It was less than a dollar at the time. I'm trying to talk to Brock about getting a place at Coachella, and he's like... You're talking about Bitcoin like, "I don't really care about this Bitcoin thing. We should get this place." I'm like 18 or 19, "We should get this place at Coachella." And then lo and behold, he understood digital currency when it came to gaming and then took that and applied a cryptocurrency and made a tremendous amount of money on Bitcoin.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I mean, what's Bitcoin at today? 100 grand something?
Rahul Sidhu:
I definitely don't want to talk about that Turner because it's so upsetting to me.
Turner Novak:
Well, I remember I did something similar with Ethereum. It came out as I was buying my first house. One of my friends was an early Coinbase employee and we got breakfast that morning and he's like, "Yeah, Ethereum. It's like, if you think about Bitcoin is gold, Ethereum is oil." And it was like a dollar or $2 and I was like, "God, maybe, but I really need to buy this house." So I did end up making a lot of money on the house. So it was a trade-off, it was like, keep renting or maybe not live somewhere, but make some amount of Ethereum. And I probably would've sold too early or have a house. So it was kind of...
Rahul Sidhu:
The cryptocurrency anti-portfolio is too depressing to discuss because there's so many opportunities like, "We would've been billionaires had we just done XYZ" that I have effectively just exited that market entirely. So I just don't have to have that feeling at all.
Turner Novak:
You didn't buy Fartcoin?
Rahul Sidhu:
I didn't buy Fartcoin. I didn't buy Askcoin. Some of my greatest regrets, Askcoin especially. Didn't buy any Trump coin. Didn't buy any of this stuff. So I don't know, man. Life's just a bunch of decisions that I've made. Plenty of bad ones when it comes to crypto.
Turner Novak:
So one thing you mentioned, you talked about high school. I know you have a friend that you've known since high school. His name's Nikita Bier.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
What happened the first time you met Nikita?
Rahul Sidhu:
Okay. So yeah, Nikita and I have known each other since high school. He was a grade below me. One day I'm hosting a little party at my house. My parents were gone and I'm like, "Oh, I want to get cheeky and host a party." One of my friends, her name is Kira, and she goes, "Hey, my buddy Nikita, can he come?" I don't know who he is, and I was like, "Yeah, sure. Whatever." So he shows up and he drinks a bunch of my mom's vodka, and then he throws up in her vase and then he leaves. And by the way, I didn't know that he threw up. I heard about it, but I didn't really think about it. I didn't know he threw up in her vase until my mom found it. And she's like, "What's going on here?" And I'm like, "Oh my God."
And then I threw him under the bus. I'm like, "Oh, this guy named Nikita threw up in your vase." And she's like, "Oh, I hate that guy." And then years later he spun up one of his first companies and did a TEDx Talk and then my mom saw it and it was like, "You should be more like your friend Nikita." And I'm like, "This guy threw up in your vase, mom, okay? He did one TEDx Talk and you forgave him?" She's like, "You should spend more time with Nikita." I called him after that. I'm like, "Hey, my mom wants me to hang out with you more. She forgives you for the vase. Tell me more about your tech company." Then we just became close friends again.
Turner Novak:
Oh, so there was a decade long rift. It's like no communication?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, yeah. There was a rift. There was definitely a rift. It was patched up. Yeah, he helped me a lot with the first company. He's actually helped me with every company I've started. He's probably been the most useful. I hate saying this because he's going to shove this in my face in the group chat when he sees this, but he's been the most useful friend I've had in my tech career, always helping me out. And he's written a check for every company I've ever done.
Turner Novak:
That's amazing. So it's like that whole angels are the highest value add. That's potentially true, at least dollars, ROI per dollar invested.
Rahul Sidhu:
Well, Nikita has a great strategy. He's like, "I will always invest in my friends, especially if I think their idea has any type of potential" because he's like, "I know that my friends are going to be really devastated if they lose my money, so they're going to try a little bit harder." And anyone who has something to lose reputationally or via friendship, he's like, "That's a good hook from an investment standpoint."
Turner Novak:
I mean, there's so many cases where the founders are not that dedicated to it, I would say. So that's a good filter. And then he actually kind of helped you a little bit with your first company SPIDR too, right? I think. So I guess I'm interested to know what exactly was the product? How did you come up with the idea? I'm vaguely familiar, but not super, super close.
Rahul Sidhu:
So 2015, I had just gotten done working as a full-time police officer. I walked away from that experience thinking like, "Here's a handful of problems in policing that I think I could potentially have an impact on just building something from a technology standpoint." One of those things is improving police and community relationships. I broke that problem down to two things. Number one is, if you were to ask a police chief 10 years prior, "What is the main performance metric for you to keep your job or get fired?", they would've told you it was crime rate. Crime rate's going up, crime rate's going down. That's the metric I get measured to." But at that time, I'm like, it's starting to shift from crime rate in 2015 to public perception. And crime rate can feed public perception, but you might have a chief that is keeping the crime rate down, but the public hates that person. Or vice versa, crime rate's going up, but the public trusts that person. And so I'm like, "Number one, how do we help measure that metric and then how do we help improve that metric?"
My main thought was, and this is what SPIDR Tech did, was we built an automated customer service platform for public safety. The way to think about is like when you buy something online, you get that text or email, "Your order is confirmed. Here's your order number. Click here to track your shipment. And then fill out this survey. Let us know how we did." These types of customer service communications, we did that for people called 911, "We're victims of crime." So you call 911, you hang up, you get a text, "Hey, here's your 911 call number. Hey, officer's on the way," these types of things. And then after that officer interacts with you and leaves, an automatic survey, "Let us know how that officer treated you, how that officer did."
So by doing that, we built this feedback loop. We'd get like 25% roughly response rate from people who got the survey that built a customer service score automatically without having to change what the officers were doing with people who were interacting with the police. And that was kind of also the performance metric, like, "How's my customer service score? As a police chief, that's something I can change. I have control over that." Because our whole thought is every single improvement or decline in public perception for an agency is based off of someone's interaction with that agency. So if you measure those interactions, you can make an impact. So that was the first company.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, thinking through how you talked about selling to police, navigating the whole chain of the city council and all that stuff, that didn't go too far up, right? You could probably sell that directly to a police chief, I'm assuming.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. The police chief was the person we'd probably spend the most time with on that because they were a direct benefiting... It wasn't one of those tools that kind of tangentially helps the agency and they go, "Cool. Thanks for doing that for us." This is a tool that the police chief would wake up in the morning and he or she would look at their phone and be like, "Oh, wonder what the customer service score was yesterday." And it was like, "I was blind and now I can see' moment where they can actually get a feeling immediately the next day for how things are going and get a pulse on their community.
So this is something that they would directly use. So they have an added layer of like, "I want to be involved in the demo and I want to make sure this thing gets across the desk because it makes my job specifically more easy or easier versus everybody else in the department."
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's sort of like you said, like a customer service tool or CRM maybe. Or not really?
Rahul Sidhu:
More of a customer service tool because it wasn't like a CRM in the sense that you'd be like, "Oh, I'm going to go look at every single contact this person has had." It's more of a, "Hey..." Just a pulse, like, "How are we doing? How is this officer's customer service score compared to this officer's customer service score? Where can we make an improvement? Where's the problem? And/or where are the people who are doing really well? Let's promote those people and make sure everyone learn from them on how to interact with community members." That's what it was for.
Turner Novak:
Nice. And then how did Nikita help you with that one?
Rahul Sidhu:
Well, that was the first time I went for venture funding and tried to build a real company. I called him. I swear to God, it was because my mom saw his TED Talk. And I called him. I called him like, "Hey, dude, saw your company." He was doing GovTech at the time. He was doing a company called Outline.
Turner Novak:
Oh yeah, I remember that.
Rahul Sidhu:
He was hanging out with John McCain or something, like showing John McCain how he can use Outline to simulate financial outcomes for the state or whatever. And I'm like, "Oh, you're doing GovTech." I called him, like, "How's this going?" I also was applying to Techstars at the time, I'm like, "Help me out. What do I need to know?" And he sent a couple blurbs to the managing director and walked me through it and effectively coached me through venture capital a bit as I was doing that first company.
Then I did the Techstars accelerator and raised some rounds. His company was doing not so great at the time, and I remember going out for tacos in Oakland with him, and he was just like, "Hey, I don't know. This may or may not work. We're going to try one more thing, and I've got two months of runway." Then I'm like, "Cool, man. I'd love to have you come in as our CMO or figure out how to get this into more hands." He's like, "Sure, maybe we'll see." And he was beat down after years and years of trying. And then he did that app. And that app was the first app. Was it TBH?
Turner Novak:
TBH, yeah.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, that he sold to Facebook at the time. And that happened so quickly. He went from like, "I might need a job" to like, "Don't call me. I'm on a yacht," like this. And I was really happy for him just to see him do that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, now he's done it a couple times.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, he did TBH again. He did TBH 2, the gas returns. Yeah, that was what? Yeah. If he could do it a third time, I'll be floored.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I mean, he's always trying. I mean, every time I'm talking to him, he's like, "I'm trying something new, working on stuff."
Rahul Sidhu:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I get to be in the little group chat where you're like, "We're all his test subjects for some crazy new thing."
Turner Novak:
Oh, amazing. I got to get on that group chat. Nikita, you got to add me. I feel like I'm on the outskirts of that. We talk about stuff, but I'm not in the inner circle yet, so I got to...
Rahul Sidhu:
It's a scary place to be in.
Turner Novak:
Oh yeah, probably. But I don't know. I got to just gas the shit up out of him on this podcast and he be like, "Oh, I love Turner. I got to add him."
Rahul Sidhu:
We're saying too many nice things about him right now. It's making me deeply uncomfortable.
Turner Novak:
That's true.
Rahul Sidhu:
Well, let's talk about the bad parts of Nikita Beer. Do we have time?
Turner Novak:
Well, actually, I think it'd be interesting. What did you mess up with SPIDR? Anything that you feel like-
Rahul Sidhu:
Oh, so many things. I think this is a standard founder's journey, but it took me a while to learn to listen to my instincts. My instincts, when it came to people or strategic decisions, et cetera, that was one thing. It was just, I was too new to the game to go... I'd have a thought, I'd be like, "Oh, I, need this type of VP of sales." And I'd be like, "No, actually, nevermind. Maybe I just need this type." And then I'm like... Things like that, and I would make mistakes over the course of a couple of years and be like, "Why didn't I just listen to myself the first time?" I'd have little things like that where I knew better, but I didn't listen to myself. I didn't repeat those mistakes the second go around.
And then the second thing I'd say is, I did not delegate well enough in the beginning. It was like almost an over correction. I would just be like, "This has to be perfect this way, this way, this way." And I actually had a moment where the top leaders in the company sat me down a couple years in the company and said like... It was a terrible moment. They just sat me down like, "Hey, we think we're going to fail because you're controlling too much. You're trying to do this, this, this. This person doesn't have the freedom to move. This person doesn't have the freedom to move." And that moment, I remember calling one of my board members that night and I couldn't sleep, and I'm like, "I might've messed this up" and like, "What do I do? I feel like I'm losing control." But he was like, "Yeah, that's kind of the point. You got to learn to delegate, pick the right people, and then trust them to do their job."
And the next time, Aerodrome, the second company, I really learned that lesson and I did it very differently on how to build the team. But those are the two of the biggest mistakes I made.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Yeah. So what would be an example of not trusting your gut? How does that usually play out? Does somebody give you advice that's different and you go with their advice because you think they know what they're talking about?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. Number one, I think you get advice from some of the people that... We were going zero to one. And I was getting advice from people that have experience going from a hundred to a thousand and thinking it's the same thing, like sales is sales or marketing's marketing or whatever the circumstances are. And even though my instinct was a little bit more like, "Oh no, you have to just pound the pavement and do these clever things," I'm like, "No, no, no, I should learn from these people." I ended up being wrong. Zero to one is very different. There's only a handful of people that I've met in my life, I'm like, "That person's zero to one, king or queen at how to do that particular thing."
So I'd say that's one side of it.
And the other side of it is when you're building a tech company, any type of company, you're really just trying to solve a problem. It's just a problem solving exercise. And then you start with like, "Let me solve this problem.' If I was just tinkering myself in a garage in that kind of head space, I'd solve this problem for these 10 customers. And then you start thinking like, "Okay. How do I take this problem and try and scale the solution potentially to solving it for a thousand or 10,000 people?" And then you go, "Oh, my solution doesn't work." But you might've already fallen in love with your solution instead of the problem, so you don't go, "I have to resolve this somehow. I'm trying to do this for a thousand people at scale." Some people don't survive that next iteration of like, "I'm going to throw the entire solution away to solve it for all these people."
Every time you jump customer segments like zero to 1 million, one to 10 million, 10 to 100 billion, you have to fully be willing to take everything I learned from this last segment and reapproach the problem with a totally new thing. And I didn't have that flexibility at the time. That's something I kind of learned by maybe sometimes just doing it the wrong way and realizing, "No, that's very key to building a very big venture business."
Turner Novak:
I feel like it's the kind of thing you probably read in blog posts maybe about conceptually how it's different. But I guess maybe actually experiencing it, maybe it's harder to recognize when it's happening, if that makes sense.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean when you're in the mix, it sometimes feels too gradual. You go from $0 to 1 million in revenue scaling your startup and you go, "Okay, cool. We got it. We figured this out. We have product market fit. Maybe one to 10." You're like, "Okay, we definitely have this." And then all of a sudden things start to stagnate at 10 and you're like... You really just try and you're like, "Oh, this is a growth problem." Or you try to force this and you never learn. "Oh no, you just don't have product market fit outside of this segment of customers that took you from zero to 1 or 1 to 10." It happened so gradually and you have such tunnel vision on how to solve that. And then you start asking people, you start asking salespeople who are like, "Oh, this is how you scale it sales-wise" or marketing people or just generally growth teams.
Or you'll meet with venture capitalists who apply things that have worked for other portfolio companies and try to put it together for yours. And then you forgot, "Hey, no. My job here is just to solve a problem. Let me go back to the drawing board on this problem to see if maybe my solution just doesn't work at scale and I have to scrap this entire idea," which is such a painful idea to have when you've gotten, let's say a 10 million ARR to go, "I have to scrap this entire thing or scrap 60, 70% of it, and we approach this entirely." It's a hard thing to do, but nobody wants to admit, "I might have, or I actually have to do this or I'm not going to get past this level."
And then you start hesitating and stalling the solution. And now you're in a position where you're like, "I'm running out of money" and then you try to go out for a fundraise. And in that fundraise, venture capitalists smell that on you. They're like, "Okay. If I'm going to give you a series A or series B, how are you going to take this to the next level?" And you don't have a convincing answer because you know that your answer doesn't work potentially.
And then you go to a point where you're like, "Okay, now I'm going to run out of money," and then you have to settle for maybe not a great acquisition or you have to wind the company down. And then you go back and go, "Why didn't I just solve this... When I do the hard thing early, I wouldn't be in this position."
I'm not saying that's what happened at SPIDR. It didn't happen at SPIDR that way, but it was definitely something I noticed was happening and something I learned myself and something I learned from other people who made those mistakes that I just became hyper vigilant about.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it sounds like almost you need to continue to keep finding product market fit or just constantly be refining it. And maybe you always have it, or maybe you just slowly drift, you got to bring yourself back. Or it's new customer segments, you need to make sure you have product market fit with that new type of customer, whether it's bigger adjacent market, something like that.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, your market gets bigger, your product might change.
Turner Novak:
So you mentioned that that didn't specifically happen with SPIDR, like terrible, terrible outcome. You ended up selling the company. How did that go? Take us inside that.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, it was actually... So as you can imagine, the idea of improving police community relationships and sentiment really in 2020 when we had all the protests and all that happened, it really opened things up quite a bit. That became like a, "How do we improve our relationships?" Every city started thinking about that.
And then there was obviously a short dip with Covid in the market, but then it just started ripping. So you can imagine it starts ripping, cities are trying to buy stuff. Some cities are going through a bit of a defund movement and buying new police technology. Even if you could be like, "This is really helpful," could have been like, "It's a harder pill to swallow, but we started experiencing some pretty good growth and we were now on the uptick." And in my head I'm like, "Okay, I could probably scale this business to XYZ, this size." But this particular... I saw this coming. This particular product is going to have to do... We're going to have to do all these things to get it to a really big venture outcome.
So I had a decision to make. Do I raise the next round of funding? And we had a term sheet. Or do I take advantage of this moment in the market where I think the companies can be priced very well and we get a great price for it and give it to somebody who's already public safety company that can take this company and do something with it and exit the position, take everything I've learned, go back into public safety and do something I think is a really big outcome that is a right now type situation? And that's what led to the second company, Aerodome, which we can talk about in a second.
Turner Novak:
Got it. Okay. So you brought up something interesting, that you had a term sheet. Did you recommend when someone's going into a acquisition process, it sounds like maybe you weren't going to raise money, but you've got the term sheet anyways? Why did you do that? How do you approach that?
Rahul Sidhu:
I wasn't going to sell.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really? Okay.
Rahul Sidhu:
No, yeah. The idea wasn't to sell. It was kind of a weird scenario. I went through a series A fundraise. I had a term sheet, I had the round filled, and I was in the middle of due diligence. It wasn't a well-known firm. In fact, I'm already forgetting the name of the firm, to be honest, but for good reason because we went through that whole process.
And at the end, they did something really weird where they, literally the day before signing, said, "Oh, hey, we want you to fire your C-suite person because we don't think she's good, and instead we have this guy that you should replace with her.' And I'm like, "Oh, I'll take that in consideration, but that's something I want to think about and work with a board on it." Like, "Why do you feel this way?" and they're explaining it. It's something I was like, "Okay, let me think about this." I have this immediate instinct to protect my people, but maybe let me be intellectually honest and really understand this. And they're like, "No, this is contingent now to us closing tomorrow." And I'm like, "Whoa. Don't love that because you just threw this at me at the end. Whether you're right or wrong, doesn't matter now it's just about how you went about this."
And I went to my board, I'm like, "Here's what's going on." And everyone's like, "If they're going to do this to you now, it is going to get a lot worse when they are on the board." So we walked away from that term sheet.
Now, before that term sheet happened, I got a soft offer to sell to a public safety company, and I kind of turned down and said, "No, we're going to fundraise." And then it just so happens the week we walked away from that diligence process, they came back and said, "Okay, what about this much more money?" And I'm like, "Okay, now this is kind of interesting." And through that process, we dealt with Covid go up and down and we're like, "Okay." I went to the board, I'm like, "How do you guys feel about this?" And they said, "This might actually be a good time. Can you see this becoming this big of a company in this amount of time?" That's what every venture capitalist wants to know. And I'm like, "Yes, but it's going to be a grind." And they're like, "Okay. Then maybe this is the time to exit the position." And that's how we ended up doing it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because you could keep working on this for five years to get the same price or whatever the timeframe is, or you just do it now.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. As the market adjusts downward from multiples, that you add a level of risk, we add a level of dilution to get there. The math just did math. It was just, you have to be willing to have that kind of conversation with board and say, "Is this the right time?"
Everybody wants to go big. No founder wants to go to the board and say, "Hey, maybe this is better for everybody." Some of our board members had a nice little TEDx and they're like, "This is great. This is fine for this moment," especially at a moment where all of a sudden everybody wants dry powder to put it in the market anyway, right? So you might have this perfect moment where it just kind of lines up. It was life-saving money for a lot of the folks in the company or life-changing money, I should say. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, as an investor, I've had both cases where take a small acquisition, you get a little bit of money. Like, you made money, you're like, "Oh, this is kind of nice as a emerging younger fund manager." You really have to wait a super long time to get your big winner, but it's kind of nice to just get like, "Oh, cool, I just got a Forex and give people some cash back." I guess it's like you put points on the board. It's like making some free throws. You're not going to win the game, but you're going to stay in the game. So those are nice.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. And as a founder, the first time you build and sell a small company even and you actually make enough money to number out, have some level of financial freedom to go after it again and not worry about your salary, little things like that, and then you know like, "I've learned so much that if I did this again, I know how to do it," that's a really freeing moment.
I think a lot of people have that daydream where they could be like, "Oh, what if it went back in time and I was 15 or 16 years old or 18 years old, but I had everything I've learned so far?" If a genie told me like, "Do you want to go do that?", would you do it? I think most people would say yes. It's like, "Yeah, I can do this way better if I went back." That's what it kind of feels like when you're a founder and you have that first company sale that makes a little bit of money and you're still kind of young and you're like, "I could do this again. I already know this industry now, and I have these venture capital relationships." Because when I went the second time around, raising went from a three-month process to a one-week process.
Turner Novak:
Like a tax probably, right?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. I mean, Alex Iskold. Shout out to Alex Iskold, who I was texting, going, "I don't know if I'm going to start it. Maybe I'll start this company. Maybe I'll put my own money into it." And Alex goes, "That's so dumb. I'll give you the money right now. No deck, nothing. Let's go. I'll give you the term sheet." And First of all, Alex is great. That's what he did for the first company. And I'm like, "Okay, yeah, maybe I'll do it." And then I go to New York and I run into David Ulevitch and Michelle Volz at Andreessen American Dynamism team, and I'm like, "Oh, I'm thinking about doing this."
"Oh, cool, let's do it." And I'm like, "All right. Well, that round kind of just raised itself." And then I'm like, "All right. Let's just spin up this guy." I didn't have any of the docs done yet. I just spin up the company. That was an easier raise. Series A was also an easier raise. But once you learn how to do it and understand how to position the company the right way, that skill makes you just want to build companies because you're like, "I know how to fuel this thing."
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because imagine the first SPIDR round, it's not like a sexy market. What the TAM in your pitch deck? How big was it?
Rahul Sidhu:
2 billion maybe. And I had to make it believable. It was such a... Every round in SPIDR Tech was a grind because GovTech and public safety and American Dynamism was 10 years away basically when I started this.
So people would be like, "Oh, GovTech sucks." There were a couple VCs out there like Ron Bouganim, people like that that were kind of focused on it. And there were companies out there that were starting to have some decent outcomes like Mark43 was. Shout out to those guys. They raised a bunch of money from tier one VCs every single round. And I'd point to them and be like, "We could be like that." But they were anomalies at the time.
And so I had to try to convince venture capitalists that GovTech could move as fast as standard enterprise status, which wasn't really true at the time. It is getting there now. And then the ACVs and all this could make sense and government's such a sticky thing. All of a sudden, companies like Flock Safety came out in 2017 and moved lightning fast, tremendous growth even for an enterprise SaaS company in government. And now all these VCs are like, "Oh, something's happening here in this industry." But that was too late. That was way past SPIDR prime days. So it helped me raise money for the second one, but the first one was real grind on the fundraiser.
Turner Novak:
Do you recommend... If somebody's starting a company, should you... Because it's easier to raise, but maybe there's more competition when you think about unsexy market versus sexy market. How do you square that up as a founder?
Rahul Sidhu:
I think that as I'm writing checks myself, like small checks, I love unsexy markets with founder market fit.
Turner Novak:
So it'd be like you, where you were at?
Rahul Sidhu:
Right. Yeah. Yeah, basically. Public safety was unsexy is starting to become kind of sexy to some people. I'm deeply unsexy personally.
Turner Novak:
Just like the ugliest, ugliest person you've ever seen?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. Yeah. I would just show up, I'd drop an accent and I'd be like, "I'm here to make cops' lives..." No, I'm not going to do the accent. Everybody's now watching the Indian guy on the podcast going, "I hope he does an accent." I can't do it. I'll get in too much trouble with the people I know.
But I was a cop and I understood the market. And that founder market fit and unsexy place where like, "How often are you going to find a cop that understands business and tech, for example?" VCs would just go, "You know what? I just like this story and I like this market fit, and you'll figure something out." That was the vast majority of my early checks. "You'll figure something out. Cool. I'll give it to you."
And you have unsexy markets. I met this guy who is a fisherman and understood fishing for squid and things like that better than anybody. And I'm like, "This is not a market that venture would dive into. But I can understand that what this person is on a napkin explaining to me, if this is true and how much this particular founder understands it, I'm just going to write this check because they'll get it. They'll figure it out." That's the kind of stuff I like personally. I think if I was going to raise a fund, I would just focus on that.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, and I feel like depending on what the valuation is, you can always make money even if the market's kind of small. You invest and it's... I'm just super, super intense, super exaggerated example. But you invest a 1 million post money, right? Get a 50X. You get the company a 20 million in revenue, it sells at two and a half times revenue, it's like 50 million bucks. That's better return than most VCs will ever see. So I think big, massive market is always great, but at the end of the day, you'd love that massive market. There's all this potential. But it also comes down to bottoms up like, "Are people going to pay for it? Is it a good founder?" et cetera, et cetera, so.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. I mean, the price you come in, that ultimately drives a lot of the decision making process that I've learned. And then you have typical benchmark pricing where typically pre-seed rounds cost as much and seed rounds cost as much. So you try to fit people into these benchmarks. But if you're flexible enough to make a deal, there's always a number where if you like the founder, you like the business and you see an outcome, there's just a magic number where all of a sudden the math makes sense for your fund. I get it, yeah.
Turner Novak:
So what then was the idea for Aerodome?
Rahul Sidhu:
Okay, that's kind of a crazy story. So it's March of 2020 and I'm still a reserve police officer from my agency in the Los Angeles area. I go to the chief at the time. And chief, I'm like, "Hey..." I'm trying to be this little mad scientist to policing in LA where I'm trying experiments, you know?
Turner Novak:
And you're still running SPIDR?
Rahul Sidhu:
I'm still running SPIDR Tech, yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
And you had not sold it yet. Okay.
Rahul Sidhu:
I hadn't sold it yet, but I asked him like, "Hey, what kind of problems can be solved?" In March of 2020, we were like... Covid just hit, we were down maybe 40, 50% of our patrol capacity because our Covid protocols are so tight that if you have the sniffles, you're not coming into work. So we were like, our response times are suffering, et cetera. It was on the police and fire side.
I had a buddy who named Fritz Reber, who was a captain at Chula Vista Police Department in San Diego. He spun up this idea of like, "You know what? I'm going to start sending drones directly to calls for service. I'm going to launch it from the rooftop of the police station and fly it myself to a 911 call a mile away and see if I can learn something about that call for service and get on the radio and say, 'Hey, the guys we're wearing red shirt and he's running away'."
Turner Novak:
So instead of taking a police car, you'd literally fly?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, yeah, I'm just going to fly a drone as the crow flies instead of a police car. And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." So I go to my Chief Keith Kauffman and I go, "Hey Keith, I want to try this." He and I had a really good working relationship. He is like, "Hey, dude. Fuck it. Go ahead." And I'm like, "Cool."
Turner Novak:
Was it legal? Could you actually do that?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, it was legal.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Okay.
Rahul Sidhu:
You know? We followed the FAA guidelines. We interpreted them and we followed them and yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay. For people listening and not watching the video, he said, yes.
Rahul Sidhu:
I said, yes. No, it was definitely legal. We were definitely pushing the boundaries for like, "Yeah, we're doing this." And the FAA at the time was like, "What's going on here?" Not to us, but generally cops trying to use drones to do this kind of stuff. That started a five-year process in the FAA that I'll talk about.
So I stood on the roof and I started sending drones directly to 911 calls as they came in and provided air support to officers before they arrived. And originally the idea was like, I can triage a call. I can send a call to some bogus 911 call from some Karen who's calling and complaining about juveniles in the park, and I could send it there and go, "This is not a 911 call or the juveniles are gone." And now because we have such little patrol resource capacity, I can say, "Don't send an officer to that. Send it somewhere else." And now my response times are shortening and things are becoming more efficient. I was clearly one out of every four calls for service just with the drone by itself.
Turner Novak:
Is that good? How does that-
Rahul Sidhu:
That's good. Yeah, no, that's making patrol more efficient. The drone gets there and I can say, "Hey, this is the deal." And either I can call that reporting party and say, "I can actually do this on the phone, or this is not an actual 911 call." And that made it so that those other three calls the patrol would go to, they'd get there faster because they didn't have to waste time on the fourth.
But the other thing that happened is on day two of that operation, we had an attempted murder in the city where someone tried to kill somebody else and then drive off. I launched the drone and I start flying. And police intuition, I'm like, "If they're leaving this area on Artesia Boulevard, they're probably going to try and cut through the... If they're really trying to get away from the cops, they're going to try and cut through the residential streets. So I'm just going to fly 400 feet and look at all these residential streets and see if I can find the car." And I found it right before they were going exit the city and get on the freeway and I get on the radio and I say, "Hey, your vehicle's traveling eastbound on aviation," and we have all the police officers jam that car up, stop it. They successfully arrested this person that would've otherwise potentially gotten away from murder.
And as soon as that happens, everyone in the police department's like, "Oh, this drone thing is the future. We would've not caught this guy and he could have gotten away with murder." And immediately in my brain, I'm like, "Oh, there's a business here. This is a really big deal." Because I'm thinking about traditional air support with helicopters flying around, it's so expensive. And I'm like, "This is just a drone that can just fly around the city." And then my thought was, "How do I make this scalable?" Right? Not just zero to one. I know how to do it zero to one. I'm going to hire people, stand on a rooftop and fly drone.
Turner Novak:
Exactly. Do exactly the same thing, yeah.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. But doing it zero to a hundred million or billions and billions of revenue means I have to build an autonomous drone station with software that understands when a 911 call comes out and what to do and fly there and build flight autonomy into this, all these types of things. So I thought, "What is the future of this concept?" It's called drone as first responder or DFR, the drone acting as a first responder. And what does it look like in five to 10 years? And let's work backwards from there. And that's what Aerodome is.
So now you have customers right now where you have drone stations installed on rooftops at these customer sites and radar that is acting as an air traffic control system where you can actually get understanding of, "Oh, this aircraft is here. Drone can't fly there." These things all talk to each other, and the drone is responding to calls for service in an average of 85 seconds response time to any 911 call in all of our jurisdictions today.
Turner Novak:
Get to a site within 85 seconds?
Rahul Sidhu:
Oh yeah. Someone calls 911 at this parking lot and says someone's got a knife, the drone gets there in an average of 85 seconds from that 911 call, which is very fast compared to anybody else trying to do the same thing.
Turner Novak:
And that probably just depends on how close the site is to the launch point?
Rahul Sidhu:
And how fast the drone launches and how fast the drone travels, all these things. There's all these parts of the response chain. How quickly do you decide to launch? How quickly does the drone actually get out of the drone station and start flying, and how quickly does the fly there? And then how good is the camera to be able to zoom in and actually get actionable information while you're flying there? Because you're just virtually on scene. You could be a mile away and have a camera that can look a mile away and you could basically be on scene virtually.
Turner Novak:
And it's basically, I think you said replacing just police helicopters. We all have maybe seen those OJ Simpson car chase and you see those come into play sometimes. Do a lot of police forces have helicopters like that?
Rahul Sidhu:
I mean, it's such an expensive proposition that no, they don't. They would love to. Every police station in America would be like, "It'd be great to have 24/7 air support where I have a helicopter, someone that just got my back in the sky just going to calls and being like, 'Hey, the guy's leaving. Here's where you go.' Or, 'Hey, this guy's waiting for you with a gun. Don't go here'." Every police department wants that. But even the simplest helicopter program cost millions of dollars a year. This is the cheapest one. So no one's going to be able to afford it except the major cities, the counties, the state governments. Your average smaller city, suburban police force cannot afford air support. So that's why this becomes a fraction of the cost, but 90% as good. I don't like to use this word democratizing because it's like in every pitch deck for everything.
Turner Novak:
It's been ruined. Yeah.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, it's ruined. It's making air support more accessible to every community in America for their public safety agencies to keep their community safer.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's kind of one of those things. Like you bring down the cost, but then that massively increases demand because it just makes it so much more accessible. Like with software, when software went from licenses to cloud, it's like instead of paying a hundred grand for this license, it's like you pay a hundred bucks a month and use it.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. It's 90% the value for 10% the cost. Every time you can find a workflow enhancement or something like that, that can really be somewhat of a force multiplier and drive that ratio. Now it's just like, "Is this the right team? Can we scale this up? Does this actually work?" That's a check right there for sure.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And you talk about the cameras being good. What can you do with the cameras? Because you just talk about being a mile away, I'm like, "Yeah, whatever. That doesn't seem realistic." What can you really tell with that?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. I mean, look, Flock Safety, the company that acquired us, they do cameras really well. One thing I'll say is, what we've effectively done, and this is a great way to build a business in the beginning, is we didn't get into all the hardware to start. We partnered with other hardware companies and we built the software to let the drones fly from a MacBook anywhere in the world. We built all that software to tie that to the drone station, to the radar to make it safe and have all the reporting and do the police workflows. We built that. And then we worked with drone station companies and radar companies and drone companies and said, "We're going to integrate your stuff."
Turner Novak:
A battery partnership too or something?
Rahul Sidhu:
No, the drones themselves already had batteries. So battery charging, we had those partnerships. So we got into the market early enough to find the best in class of every hardware piece. And then my job was to convince all those people to work exclusively with us as we built this market, and they did it. Every one of them worked exclusively with us.
Turner Novak:
This is on the public safety, on the public safety side?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, for public safety. So the radar company, the drone station company, all these companies, we signed exclusive deals and said, "You're going to work with us and we're going to go to market for you." And it wasn't until we showed success and we were in a position where like, "Okay, we either raise a series B and we get into hardware now and we're actually start owning some of this and verticalizing it. Or we ended up selling to Flock Safety who has really good at hardware and has a lot of resources to make this happen." But that was ultimately always going to be the next step of the business.
Turner Novak:
So how did you decide then early on when you're like, "Should we build it? Do all this stuff ourselves? Should we do all these different partnerships that sounded kind of complicated?" How did you decide on going vertically integrated versus...
Rahul Sidhu:
I mean, this is just one of those things. I had the experience to know if you try to take too many bites of an elephant as a seed stage company, you'll just fail. Even in the market. At the time, I thought maybe the US wasn't even the right customer for this. I was like... I had to sit there and go, "How do I build a business that if I took $6 million worth of capital, which was six and a half was our seed round, I could prove this concept enough to then take this to the next stage and get to 10 million in revenue. How do I build this business? I don't know if I can do it in the US because the FAA wasn't allowing for this." They ended up allowing for it, but they weren't allowing for it. I don't want to get into the hardware.
So the only way to do this is if I built a software for this amount of money and partnered with these hardware companies so I didn't have to front this cost and prove this out enough to go, "Okay. Now, if I raise this much money, I can either acquire companies or start building part of the stack and then we negotiate the license deal with these companies and then get to a point where now I'm raising even more money and now I'm building the entire hardware stack or my license deals are really aggressive."
I had to step that in because you just can't... I'm not Elon. I can't just go, "Hey, I need $10 billion to start this crazy drone company and I'm going to do it all from day one." We're not going to be able to do that. No one's going to be able to do that. Very few people.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, you mentioned all these FAA changes. What was going on? Because it sounds like before, there were some gray areas. Now it's a little more black and white, it's a little more clear. What were some of the changes that were going on?
Rahul Sidhu:
Well, so the FAA... Drone laws are... If you're just the average person, you can't fly your drone over people. You can't fly it at night. You can't fly it beyond visual line of sight. Meaning if you can't see the drone, you're operating illegally,
Turner Novak:
Do you get arrested? Do you get fined? What happens?
Rahul Sidhu:
I mean, look, technically it could be criminal. It's rare, but it could be. You could get fined as a drone operator, that's more likely, if someone reports to you, the FAA investigates you and determines that's what you were doing. Typically, these enforcement actions are reserved for someone doing something dumb that resulted in a bad thing, like people flying drones where there's wildfires and they crash into the wildfire planes. Yeah, that guy's going to maybe go to jail. So that's why those laws exist.
But the FAA started providing waivers to public safety agencies that said, "Okay. If you're flying to an emergency, we're going to let you fly over people. If you're transiting, you're flying to emergency, you could fly at night because you've shown us you're going to do these types of safety things and you're a public aircraft operation so we can hold you accountable." And then they started going, "Okay, you could fly beyond visual line of sight, but only if you have a visual observer on the other end of this." Some stipulations that allowed for this type of zero to one prove the concept outcome where I could go to police department and say, "Okay, we can't fly this autonomously.
The FAA is not allowing for that, but I could just pay somebody to stay on the roof for a while and then you're going to be able to fly this thing." But now it's like, "It's kind of my problem this person's on the roof and not yours because I'm not getting the margins I want because I have to pay for this person." But that's enough for me to prove this, and then build tech to get the FAA comfortable to say, "Hey, okay, you can actually fly a waiver and take that person off the roof because your tech is so good."
We have that now where we've actually gotten these beyond visualize site waivers to say, "You can fly anywhere in the city, 400 feet up in the air." The tech is that good now. But it took years for the FAA to get comfortable and also took political winds changing where people are willing to go to regulatory agency and say, "Hey, I know you're not incentivized potentially to take risks, but we as the federal government have to kind of push you because the police department can use this. This makes sense. They can do this to save lives on the other end." So now there's a risk in not allowing the police department to do that that isn't your job, but now we have to push you to do it. It's like the regulatory wind started to change. And now businesses like this are like, "This is a great time to be a drone company because all these things you can do with drones you couldn't do previously, create customer outcomes that create large markets." Like drone delivery, et cetera, is the next thing that beyond visualized sites can open up for people.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I was talking to Saar Gur at CRV and he was telling me about when they were doing diligence, trying to decide to invest, he talked to a police chief and they were saying the worst that can happen is the drone crashes into something and it's like 1 pound or 2 pound, whatever the weight is, versus the other side is a cop car that is going 100 miles an hour smashes into a bus or something.
Rahul Sidhu:
Or a police helicopter that falls on the sky.
Turner Novak:
Oh yeah, exactly. So it sounds like even the worst case scenario outcome is actually way better than the other worst case scenario outcome.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. And that's simple enough to understand. Saar, by the way, incredible guy. I just got to take the second to plug him. I said, Alex Iskold's great and I want to make sure Alex gets his credit. Saar is like... I hope for the opportunity to work with him constantly in the future because he's just so good at his job and so founder-friendly and fun and enjoyable to work with. And even the diligence process with them. Basically, when we were doing our fundraise for the series A, I basically just would... I was still a reserve officer for my agency, so I had a little bit of an opportunity to show people, "Hey, this is what this tech looks like when it's live." And we were deployed to a police department.
I would call VCs. I had a bunch of VCs come out, like COTU I remember came out, and Altimeter, Gerson respond, he came out, all these people would come out, and then Saar at CRV. I'd pick them up and I would take them to the police station and I would sit them down in the chair with the air support operation and I would actually respond to 911 calls live with them, and that was the demo.
I remember Saar and Veronica and the CRV team was sitting behind me and I'm flying this drone to a 911 call. And the 911 call was a poor kid was in a car, it was a blue BMW and she called 911 and said, "My mom and dad are fighting." You could hear them screaming. She's like, "I think the car's going to crash. Someone please come help us." And the drone took off and I started flying it directly to where I think they were going to be. We were able to help locate the car and do all kinds of stuff. And Saar's just saying, they're going like, "Oh, got it. That's it. Makes sense. I totally understand how if this drone wasn't there, that kid could have gotten hurt and how every police department in America is going to be like, 'I want that outcome'." And after that, he's like, diligence process. He's just one of those guys that gets it.
Turner Novak:
Mm-hmm. Got it. Okay. And you [inaudible 01:02:04] instead of it sounds like funds that probably could have given you a lot more money, a little bit of maybe of a different product. How did you decide who to raise from for that series?
Rahul Sidhu:
We had some great options and term sheets. There was no bad option. There were a lot of folks that I was like, "Okay, I got to come back to them for the B. I really like them." At the end of the day, these tier one firms, the top firms are generally going to provide you with a lot of the same stuff. Cool, you get the clout from it and you get access to a lot of capital and they have a great network and they have all these... Some of the firms will have like, "We have recruiting resources and marketing resources and all these things." Great, that's all good. They're going to be a great signal for the next round. All that stuff kind of equals out at the end. Then it just comes down to like, what partner do you want to work with? It's just me and this person's going to join the board.
When I was evaluating this, Saar's... Other founders were calling me like, "Take the money from Saar." And these are the founder of Mercury, the founder of Patreon, Jamie Siminoff from Ring. All these people were calling me like, "Hey dude, of all the VCs I've worked with, I would work with Saar again." And that went a long way with me because these are busy people that were like, "Of course I'll do this for you, Saar. I'm not even going to wait. I'm just going to call this guy."
And everyone told me this. I asked everybody to tell me a story, like, "Tell me about the most challenging moment with Saar. And they all had really good stories and I'm like, "I got to do it." So I just called him and I'm like, "Dude, just if you can meet this number, I'm going to shut this whole process down and just sign the term sheet because I want to work with you." And I was right. If anything, I underestimated how pleasant it would be to work with this guy.
Turner Novak:
Oh wow. Okay. It sounds you went through this process, you raised some money and then you just... I don't know actually how recently, but you guys, you've since sold the company to Flock, and we talked about Flock. What was that process like? It sounds like way bigger market, better product, better product market fit. You sold the company. Just talk me through that process.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, we sold it. We sold it pretty quick. It was like 17 months or something, which is like most people just hear that number and go, "Why did you sell so early? Either something went wrong or you as a founder took the chips off the table too quickly?" But the reality is the way that this worked out is number one, Flock Safety is just an incredible company.
In public safety, it's the company that I've watched since they started in 2017, Garrett, the CEO, who's just a really good leader, and I watched this company start in 2017 and do something that every other GovTech company just dreamt of doing, which was just grow beyond standard enterprise SaaS scale in an industry, like I said earlier, that was just really difficult to grow in. And they cracked the code. and I watched them go from $0 to hundreds of millions of ARR in a period of seven years in this industry. And I'm like, "That's incredible." Their numbers, their margins were good. Very good reputation in the public safety industry. And there's no other company in the space that's like that. There's plenty of good promising companies early, but no one's done what Flock Safety has done in this space.
Turner Novak:
So you did not want to sell?
Rahul Sidhu:
No. No, I didn't. I did not want to sell. I originally didn't want to sell. And I talked to Garrett and he's like, "Yeah, this DFR space is interesting." And we talked about it.
And it actually all started as me building a better relationship with him. I really respected him as a leader. Still do. And then it ended up being a situation where we decided in early January, the series A, he heard that I was fundraising because we shared a couple board member or we shared a board member in [inaudible 01:05:56] Andreessen, and he's like, "Hey dude, do you want to partner up?" And he pitched me this idea of like, "We've got this tremendous go-to market force and thousands of public safety customers and you've got this great tech. Let's find a partnership that works." And they rarely work, but this case, this made plenty of sense. And I said yes. And then I even put them in series A.
The first few months we started kind of co-pitching together. They would bring us into a pitch just to test it out, like, "Hey, come pitch us major city here.'" And it would be Garrett. Garrett still does pitches. He's still in the mix every single day doing these pitches, which is something I respect about him. And he is like, "Let's pitch this one together." And I did this a few times and he saw that the customer would light up and be like, "This is incredible." And then I saw that they had such respect for Flock and Garrett that the sale was like a relationship based thing and we can get in there. I'm like, "Oh, this is kind of like a match made in heaven."
And then I went to this event that Founders Fund put together, shout out Trae Stephens and Delian and the folks over there, Solana. They got a bunch of us in a room and Garrett was there. He and I spent like... We had a couple of drinks and Garrett goes, "Hey, how fast can we go? What if I were to say, let's give this to every major city in America? What would be your answer?" And I'm like, "It's going to cost this much money." He's like, "Cool, let's do it." And I'm like, "Are you sure? That's scaring me. That's incredible." But he's like, "I care about the customers. I want this everywhere. I'm willing to spend some money on this. This is incredible. Let's make it happen." And it still wasn't an acquisition, it was just a potential partnership.
And the more we pulled in this idea of like, how much is it going to cost and how do we do this right, it just became too obvious that this acquisition makes sense. And when I said, "Garrett, the number is this." Because this is too good of a company at this stage, it's so promising, everyone's so excited, we just raised around six months ago, the acquisition was priced, I think very fairly. And everybody in the board was like, "This is one of those rare scenarios where something this early makes sense and this outcome is good." And a lot of folks rolled their stock into Flock because Flock is such a good stock that they're like, "This is a great opportunity to just roll into this company that I otherwise wouldn't have access to." So it all just worked out.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. It sounds like the perfect storm of just everything going right from founders getting along, product overlap, like the distribution channels. It sounds like instead of having to fundraise, you got capital from the balance sheet, somebody else's kind of fundraising for you, I guess, the business, I'm sure. How big is Flock right now? What's public on how big it is?
Rahul Sidhu:
That's a good question. I don't know what's public.
Turner Novak:
You said hundreds of millions of ARR?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yes, I feel confident I can say that. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Okay. I feel like I've seen that too, hopefully. If not, we'll bleep it out. We'll go back and bleep on all those instances.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. The last round was in the early billions. And it's a very fair valuation, I think.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And it's not an AI company, so it's not like 100X ARR.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, it's not hype-based. Yeah, it's not a FOMO evaluation.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. If it's growing faster, you're probably looking like 20X ARR or something like that. I could see that. Mid-teens, 10.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, it's a really sticky, the NRR on this. It just has all the metrics to be worth a great number. And Garrett's a very disciplined CEO. He's not going to go out there and raise hype rounds. It's really, really good about that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So what's changed post acquisition on your life, product life, company-wise?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. Look, like I said, this isn't my first acquisition. I've also seen so many go poorly that it was something I was worried about. And it hasn't gone that way. One of the things is... Something that's really key that I think founders need to think about is when you do an acquisition, you should really focus on building a relationship with the leadership at that company and determining like, "Would I just work for these people?"
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because your boss now technically, right?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. Yeah. He's like my one man board. I report to him. And I just thought to myself, "Would I work for this guy if it was just another circumstance?" And as I built a relationship with him, it's kind of funny, I talked about this Founders Fund event we went to and we were doing things at that event. I think I'm allowed to say this. But we were chopping wood, competing in chopping wood together.
Turner Novak:
I mean, you got to show us the axe you said you got.
Rahul Sidhu:
Oh yeah. This is... Yeah, they gave me this axe because Garrett and I chopped the most amount of wood in the shortest period of time. I was using this to open a package right here, which is why I have this.
Trae, this is why I have this access. My package opening. It makes me feel manly every time Amazon comes to my door.
But he and I were doing this stuff, chopping wood together. We're just having a good time. Every time I had a conversation with him, it just gelled and I'm like, "I would totally work for this guy." It feels like 80% of like, "Is an acquisition going to go well? Does the founder of the company being acquired get along with more often than not the CEO of the company that's acquiring them? And would they work well together?" That's totally the case. The way we solve problems is similar. The way we think about these things is similar. He's just, like I said, a good boss and a good leader with the same vision that also... The visions align perfectly. So much of that happens where you now just build trust and he's just like, "Hey, dude, stick to founder mode. Go build this company."
I highly recommend, if you can find an acquisition that goes like that, you should do it. I tell everybody who talks to block and thinks about it, like, "This is what it feels like. The budget gets a lot bigger and you got a lot of support from a very competent leadership team and a company that has a really strong go-to market. And a product that you're building, if your product can fit into that and the cultures mesh well, it's going to be great." And I'll tell you, it's been great.
Turner Novak:
It sounds like the trope of founders could never work for another person or whatever, it kind of sounds like you got to, I don't know whether that's true or not, in the strengths of an acquisition going well, you got to find people that you would actually work for and work well with.
Rahul Sidhu:
I think that is true. Just to be clear, I think a lot of founders don't want to work for somebody and they don't work well for others. I don't think that's the case for everybody. I just think some of the best in prolific founders are that way, to be clear.
But the best acquiring CEOs or acquiring founders understand that about founders. When they buy a company, they think, "Well, I'm actually buying the company. I'm buying the founder as well and the founders of the company." The value of this company is the way it is because they're operating founders. And they think about that with the acquisition bank like, "Can I keep that going?" And they build that into the operating relationship.
I do not feel like I'm not the founder within the company. I very much still feel like a founder at Flock. And it didn't feel like that... It might not feel like that for other people at other companies, but it definitely feels like that here. All the fun of building a company still exists. So it's the best of all the worlds. I know it's rare, but if you know that's going to happen. If you're a founder looking for an acquisition, you feel pretty comfortable about that, take the leap if it makes sense on the math.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So it sounds like this isn't a rest and invest situation. You're still-
Rahul Sidhu:
No,
Turner Novak:
It's still like... Do you feel like, did it accelerate you a little bit more or is it just like [inaudible 01:13:36]?
Rahul Sidhu:
Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no. It is. It is a... I'm working even harder. I thought I was working hard before, but there's a responsibility here, my budget increase and we're going after it. And Flock has a culture of like, "We build stuff here and we are not going to be slow." And so we're doing that. That can kind of thrown in a deep end, like, "Hey, cool. You wanted to raise this big round. We're going to spend even more money than that and now go make it happen." And I need to do this. This is still on me. You do an acquisition, you buy a company. "I have this even more. I need to go out there and be good at this."
So yeah, no, it is definitely not a rest/invest. My button is down. I have one button unbuttoned, but it's not because I'm relaxed, it's because I'm in Miami and this is just how people work here. I want to make that super clear.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Plus, it gives you... Yeah, you're always like, you're moving around a lot. You don't want to be buttoned too much up. You're just working so hard.
Rahul Sidhu:
I need airflow. I need airflow. Yeah, the airflow has to come in.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So actually, I got to give a shout-out to, speaking of 2048, they sent me a picture. You once met a guy, a homeless guy that's wearing an Aerodrome t-shirt. That's got to be the craziest thing as a founder. What is that story?
Rahul Sidhu:
Okay. So I was living in New York at the time. My chief of staff, Tyler Roberts... Shout out, Tyler, I'm still upset with you for this. We were doing our first swag order. He's like, "Let's get some t-shirts." So we ordered these t-shirts. Tyler ships it to himself but then leaves and somehow the box gets stolen of shirts.
Now, I didn't know any of this by the way. I still think the t-shirts are coming. He hasn't told me yet. So I'm walking. I'm in Soho and I'm passing... For those of you in New York, passing the ball to the door and walking to my house. And we ordered t-shirts weeks ago and I'm not really thinking about it. And then all of a sudden I see this guy and he's walking past my place, which is by the way, so far from where Tyler lives. It's not like it happened locally. He's in a different neighborhood. He's walking past my place and he's wearing an Aerodrome shirt with my logo, like the Aerodrome logo. And I'm like, "What?" And I'm like, "This is not a customer." I can tell you that right now. This guy...
Turner Novak:
He's not literally a customer.
Rahul Sidhu:
He's struggling. He's struggling, yeah. And I walk up to him. You're a police officer, you developed the confidence to just walk up to somebody that otherwise you would try to be maybe a little bit worried about on the subway. I just walk up and I'm like, "Hey, where did you get that shirt?" And he goes, "Oh dude, my buddy gave it to me. We found it." And I'm like, "No, you didn't." But I'm like, "Oh, okay." I'm like, "Dude, I think it's a cool shirt." He's like, "Yeah, it's pretty cool, huh?" I'm like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Let's take a photo." So I take a selfie of me with this guy and he is like big smile on him.
Turner Novak:
A huge smile.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, yeah. I take a selfie and I said to Tyler, I'm like, "Hey, man, found the shirt. What's going on?" He said, "Oh dude, I was afraid to tell you, but yeah, they got stolen." I'm like, "Well, found them." And then he goes like, "Should we ask that guy for the rest of the shirts?" I'm like, "No, dude. We shouldn't do that." These shirts belong to the streets now, okay? So we're going to let them hang. We're going to learn a lesson from this. I'm going to get maybe 67 likes on Twitter for this and we're going to move on."
Turner Novak:
Amazing.
Rahul Sidhu:
But probably my favorite selfie I've ever taken.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that was a good picture. Just insane story too.
Well, so thinking about just drones more broadly, it sounds like there's changes that are happening. Maybe the regulations are allowing more business opportunities. How are you thinking about just the future of drones? What kind of things, people listening, what can we expect over the next couple years? What kind of opportunities are going to open up?
Rahul Sidhu:
There's a lot happening in the drone space that just, I would say these are all tailwinds to a pretty incredible change in a lot of mostly enterprise workflows. I'm not saying this in any particular order.
The first thing we already talked about are the regulatory tailwinds, right? So those are like, the government is allowing you to use a drone in a very practical common sense way safely, beyond visual line of sight. So things like flying a drone for delivery miles away, these things are opening up. Flying a drone for public safety.
Turner Novak:
Is this pretty realistic, like having an Amazon drone deliver a package in the next couple of years?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yes. Yes, definitely realistic.
Turner Novak:
Is there a weight issues, where like, you know?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, there's still the payload and drone or stuff like that has to be 55 pounds. There's numbers that have to be met, but my point is there's a lot of opportunity to make an impact with drones. I largely think that this fits into a larger thesis, which is most venture capitalists are going to say the next five to 10 years, the gold rush is people who can combine robotics and AI to drive massive outcomes or workflow changes, et cetera, especially for enterprise.
Turner Novak:
It's like the biggest meme, like massive TAMs, like a hundred trillion dollars, right?
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you were to take like, "Hey, if I could make this activity autonomous, something from driving someone from point A to point B and I can make that autonomous, it's robotics and autonomy kind of making that happen..." Drones in that sense are just robotics, and if you can get the right autonomy in there to make these workflows occur, then it's going to be really interesting.
I think that the technology's finally getting there where you're, "Yeah, cool, I could put them in video or in on this drone and compute so much on the edge and now I can connect this drone through LTE infrastructure or 5G infrastructure, satellite infrastructure, be able to talk to it in a remote area." That's starting to happen now, and it's like, "Okay, I can build the models for this drone to ultimately not just have flight autonomy of flying from point A to B safely, but mission autonomy of going, this is what I as the drone need to do and make decisions in real time as I'm flying."
These things are really incredible. The technology obviously has gotten there. And the forcing factors of the war in Ukraine, for example, forcing people to get really intuitive, or sorry, not intuitive, smart about using drones in really cheap environments and contested environments. If I can fly a drone from point A to point B a couple miles away in a really radar-jamming environment where it's just sensing where it is visually and then deliver a payload, like an actual bomb, and hit that target with a laser and this whole thing cost me a few hundred bucks, if you distill that into all the things that need to happen to make that happen, now you're going, "Okay, cool. There's a zero to one outcome there." Despite the fact that it's war, there's a zero to one outcome there that we can now go, "Cool, can I deliver a package? Can I go do security? Can I measure or inspect a bridge or a power line for wildfires and things to make sure that this thing doesn't ignite?" I can do all these things now way cheaper than I had to do them in the past.
Turner Novak:
And really, war and things like that usually drives technological project, like the progress. The military, a lot of the times, is one of the first applications of new technology. So I know thinking about war is always like, you never want people to be dying and things like that. But to your point, it's like people are figuring out how to use drones for solving problems now in different ways. So it's basically to kind of summarize, it's almost like self-driving autonomous, smart drones that can solve new business problems.
Rahul Sidhu:
They're flying robots. They're just flying robots. The same way you think, "Oh, I can make a robot do XYZ to solve my business problem," it's that same thing. You just fly it.
Turner Novak:
Now flying [inaudible 01:21:15].
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you just can do all this other stuff, but also, "Oh, by the way, I can just fly across the city and then go on the ground and do all this stuff then fly back."
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah. Drones have been good at flying for 10 plus years. They just didn't have the ability to be smart really. And then when they did have the ability to be smart, they didn't have the ability to like... People didn't have the ability to legally use them for smart cases because of the regulatory environment, and that has changed. So it all comes together. Now is a good time for it.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. So I know one big public topic has been these New Jersey drones. Do you know anything about those or have an opinion on them?
Rahul Sidhu:
Man, the vast majority of the drone settings in New Jersey are just people seeing regular drones or aircraft that are normal or copycats that are trying to spook people out. There's a lot of that. My New Jersey police buddies would be just like, "A lot of people would fly balloons and make them look scary." But there's still a really small percentage of these sightings I just don't have an answer for. And my answer is like, maybe DOD. Maybe. Maybe some guy in his garage who's trying to do something crazy that's just flying some crazy stuff around.
I don't want to be the aliens guy, but my point is I've seen some pretty weird stuff. And I'm always going to say there's a greater than 0% possibility that it could be something that we genuinely go, "That's incredible. I don't have a scientific explanation for that." So I'm not ruling it out, but I'd say the vast majority of sightings were just regular normal things.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Well then it just became this topic of you hypothesize about what it might be and then that drives more evil hypothesizing.
Rahul Sidhu:
Well actually, it brought... You know what it did? One thing I did like about the New Jersey drone phenomenon is it did bring something really important to the fray, which is counter drone. The United States is like, every day we wake up and someone didn't use a drone to blow something up in this country is just a gift, and we should wake up and go, "Thank you. Today is not the day." I actually said this to Congress. Because not only it's actually a regulatory problem. But right now, the law, the federal law is that if someone walks up to a police officer and says, "Hey, I've attached a bomb to this drone and I'm pressing this button. Now it's going to autonomously fly to that school," a cop legally cannot shoot that drone down. They're breaking the law. They're not allowed to do it.
New Jersey made that obvious. You had all these cities and people were afraid and the cops were not allowed to do it. Only the federal government and certain agencies are allowed to disrupt an aircraft in the air.
Turner Novak:
Oh, because the FAA, the Federal Aviation-
Rahul Sidhu:
Yes, exactly.
Turner Novak:
Oh, okay.
Rahul Sidhu:
Because they own the airspace. So a cop can't just take a shotgun and shoot that thing out of the sky without violating the law, even in a terrible scenario. They might still do it and be like, "Okay. Hopefully the federal government gives me a pass," but it's illegal for them to do that.
So now cities and police chiefs are going like, "Hey, what do we do if this is a real problem?" Because someone could go to Best Buy and buy a drone and then connect a bomb to it or make a drone and connect a little bomb to it that they made from ingredients from Home Depot and fly it into something a mile away and be gone. That's the reality of it. Sorry to scare everybody, but that's true. And so now people are starting to go, "Okay, we have to think about the regulatory side of this. How do we protect every city in America from this?" And we're working with partners on that too. That's something that we've talked about. I think it's important. I think we need to be ready for something like that. Every company that's working in that space, kudos to them.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a big problem. You talk about these things that can fly on their own, go anywhere. Amazing opportunities, but also we ought to be aware of the risks.
Rahul Sidhu:
It's like any technological advancement. There's a way to use it poorly.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that's a common theme in the podcast is like, AI can be used... Great things can also be used very badly. Or if you go back to the beginning of humanity, fire. You could say, "Fire. We're going to burn down the huts and the village is going to die" but also like, "We cook food. We use it to..." It was the first technology we had, right?
Rahul Sidhu:
Electricity could be a weapon. Cars could become weapons. There's plenty of things. Nuclear has been a weapon, but is also the source of energy in a way that's going to potentially power a lot of our future. There's a lot of, every time a technology comes around, we have to understand it. We have to build some regulatory framework into it that doesn't stifle innovation, but protects people. And then we have to police it. There has to be some enforcement there. And that has to evolve over time. The same concept applies to drones.
Turner Novak:
Well, Rahul, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Rahul Sidhu:
Absolutely, man. Great to have you. I'd like to be in your TikToks at some point. If you're still doing those, throw me in the background. I've been practicing my dances.
Turner Novak:
I mean, you said you're in Miami. I'm in Miami. I haven't been for a year, but maybe I should come. Maybe we could do a co-lab or something.
Rahul Sidhu:
Let's do it, dude. I don't have a TikTok, but I want to be in yours.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So you don't have a TikTok. Where can people kind of find you, follow you?
Rahul Sidhu:
Find me on Twitter, yeah. Let's put my Twitter on the screen right here, rahoolsidoo with Os. Two Os instead of Us. I'm trying to amass a Twitter following like the size of Nikita's Twitter following so I can use mine against his. I want to have an equal kind of Cold War scenario where we're constantly fighting on Twitter. I just don't have the following for it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, you're kind of outnumbered. He has a lot of very adamant fans, I would say.
Rahul Sidhu:
It's kind of scary. He's got an army. And he knows it. He definitely knows it, which is why I need one to counteract his. Here's what I'll promise you. I will protect everyone from his Twitter following with my own Twitter following. I just need an army against his army.
Turner Novak:
This is like classic police officer strategy, to serve and protect.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yes. He's on the other side of the law.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Nikita's is just like a bunch of teenagers that do anonymous polling apps. Yours is like, police officers. I feel like you've got a way better audience than he does.
Rahul Sidhu:
Yeah, his are just more active because those are the types of people that are going to reply on the tweets and say some crazy stuff, and that just drives engagement. He's got a good engagement thing going.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, he does. Well, cool. I guess we'll see you on Twitter or I guess X as they like to call it now.
Rahul Sidhu:
Sounds good. See you, man.
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