#096 ForceMetrics | Go Head First Into the Bad

Show Notes

We can all agree on the importance of public safety. Yet, in today’s world, many of the people in charge of public safety are doing their jobs with less information than an Uber driver. That is precisely the problem that Andre McGregor has set out to change with his startup ForceMetrics. Using his experience as a former FBI special agent and building cybersecurity software in Silicon Valley, McGregor is building a company that aims to deliver critical information to police and other public safety officials as efficiently as possible to help make us all safer.

Andre recently spoke with Roland Siebelink on the Midstage Startup Momentum Podcast to talk about his idea, how ForceMetrics is changing the world, and his journey as a founder:

• How ForceMetrics worked with real police officers to perfect its product.

• The art of finding design partners and getting the most out of customer feedback.

• How to find the right investors at the right time.

• The things Andre is no longer allowed to do as a CEO.

• The importance of not overcomplicating things.

Transcript

Andre McGregor:
Police officers, dispatchers are making life and death decisions with less data than your Uber driver.

Intro:
Welcome to the Midstage Startup Momentum podcast. Each week, we interview up-and-coming founders of some of the fastest-growing mid-stage startups across the world. Your host is Roland Siebelink, who will share some of his own experience helping startups scale from 10 to 1000 people in a few years. Here is Roland.

Roland Siebelink:
Hello and welcome to the Midstage Startup Momentum podcast. My name is Roland Siebelink, and I'm a coach and ally for many of the fastest-growing startups in the whole world. And today, we are very honored to have with us a former FBI agent. It is Andre McGregor, who is the founder and CEO of ForceMetrics. Hello, Andre, how are you?

Andre McGregor:
I’m good. Thanks for having me.

Roland Siebelink:
And did I get that right? You're a former FBI agent? Because I do not want to get in trouble with the authorities.

Andre McGregor:
I am a former FBI special agent.

Roland Siebelink:
A special agent, even. Wow. I've never had a special agent on the podcast before. That is a first today. But we're not here to talk about the FBI - or at least not directly. We are talking about ForceMetrics, your startup. Andre, first question, as always, what is ForceMetrics doing? What are you bringing to the world that is of value to folks? And how are you making the world a better place?

Andre McGregor:
ForceMetrics is a precision policing platform. Essentially, we sit on top of large data sets of public safety systems - your 911 dispatch systems, police reports, jail reports, traffic tickets, body cam videos. Police departments collect a lot of information, and it's oftentimes ineffective for them to get it from multiple systems. We're data integration, but when you think about it, we're like Google meets Zillow for public safety data.

The idea there is, at the end of the day, an officer is trying to figure out a lot of questions in a short amount of time. Are you going to kill me? Are you going to kill someone else? Are you going to kill yourself? And then why am I here? What are the issues that you're dealing with - domestic violence, PTSD from the military, autism, dementia? And doing it with a positive outcome at the end, we synthesize all that information into a very easy-to-format smartphone app, and is accessible to thousands of officers daily.

Roland Siebelink:
Excellent. Okay. If a shooter is targeting the police officer, they just pull out their smartphone and they look at the analysis that you guys provide. Is that how I should imagine it?

Andre McGregor:
You can if this is television and NCIS and CSI. But in reality, you're gonna call 911, and someone that you've never met before is gonna pick up the phone and ask you some questions. And honestly, calling 911 is a very scary moment for most people. Outside of actively giving birth, it's usually the worst moment of someone's life when they're calling that number. You're panicking, you're speaking loudly, you're speaking quickly, you may not tell me where you are. There's a lot of information that the dispatcher is trying to get. That's the first point.

Then we're gonna send someone there to actually deal with whatever you're going through and they've never met you either. What are they going into? What's previously happened there? When you think about public safety, I like to do it in percentages; 90% of it is administrative boredom and 10% is sheer terror.

Roland Siebelink:
Excellent. That is probably very similar to the startup founder's life. Maybe not boredom, but at least all the bad things that happen to you, or the times you want to give up, and then the 10 % of elation and big breakthroughs that you may experience. How has that been so far? How long have you been a founder by now? How long ago was it that you left the special forces?

Andre McGregor:
It's been four years so far. I transitioned from being a gun-toting special agent to going back into Silicon Valley. I was at Brown University. After graduating, Goldman Sachs and Cardinal Health and then became an FBI agent. But I always wanted to go back to my engineering roots. I turned the badge and gun, decided to go to Silicon Valley building cybersecurity software.

And then 2020, 2021 were tough years for everyone. My academy classmate was shot and killed in a routine search warrant. We later found out that there was information that the guy that killed him and his partner, Laura, wanted to kill law enforcement in a blaze of glory, but it was lost in a paragraph in a report of a bunch of reports that would never surface. And through that trauma and a lot of tears, it was, “How can we bring context in a very quick but accurate way to the people that are answering the emergencies of all of the communities?”

ForceMetrics spawned out of the ability for me to combine not only my engineering abilities, my understanding of data and databases, but then also having arrested people, having used force, knowing what it's like to arrest someone and how to investigate a crime, and then doing it in a modern platform like an Apple iPhone.

Roland Siebelink:
And not the least that personal trauma that you went through and understanding the real impact you can make on the world if only that data would be better available, right?

Andre McGregor:
Yeah, you have to think about it, police officers, dispatchers are making life and death decisions with less data than your Uber driver. And that's unacceptable. We need to be providing that information in droves, in a way that's easy to understand while they're driving to that call, while they're interacting with someone. And AI is a big component to a lot of this because it's streamlining and making it easy to digest that information.

But the whole idea for me is I just wanted to take what I learned from chasing cyber criminals in the FBI to now chase inefficiencies in public safety. We're in 35 cities and counties in 12 states. We continue to grow and we're saving lives every day.

Roland Siebelink:
As I mentioned to you, Andre, in the conversation before we started the recording, we are typically in the business of hunting for breakthroughs for startups. I guess you just described the first breakthrough - that insight that got you going on the app. Did that take you a long time to decide to go there, and what really spurred you to take this step as opposed to just thinking about it?

Andre McGregor:
Starting a company, especially for the first time - I'm a very risk-averse person. To get investment money, it's all about de-risking. We had to identify that there was a problem we're solving, which I think at that time, everyone understood that public safety concerns were high in communities. There were communities that were on fire because of protests. There were concerns around safety in general. That was easy identifying the problem. But solutioning was a little bit harder because you have to be right all the time.

We are very focused on getting it right the first time. It took about two, two and a half years before we deployed our application. We wanted to make sure the application worked first and worked consistently.

Roland Siebelink:
Okay. How would you figure out whether you were on the right track during all that time? Because two and a half years is a very long time to keep developing. I'm sure that after two and a half years was not the first you exposed it to potential customers.

Andre McGregor:
No, that’s a good question. Our first exposure was putting engineers in cop cars around the country and doing ride-alongs and saying, “Go pull people over, go sit in a dispatch center, go into a domestic violence call.” And understand not only what technologies they use today, what are the information points that they need, but also what's the perspective of not only the officer, but the victim and the offender.

Now you can start to understand those pieces. You think of it like agile development on steroids; we’re constantly building the app and then getting into a cop car, testing it out, rebuilding the app off of feedback, getting back in a cop car, trying it out. And then over time, it's ready for prime time. Let's give it to a couple of departments to use. And we have three departments that were our first beta users. And then from there, it's just been significant growth.

Roland Siebelink:
Those were design partners in a way, those FBI police departments, whichever services you worked with. How did you persuade them to even try this out while it was in such an early stage?

Andre McGregor:
I ended up going to a conference for evidence-based policing - you end up getting a lot of data-conscious, data-minded researchers, analysts, and even police chiefs. And there were a couple of police chiefs that spoke about research projects that they had done within their department. And at the end, they said, “Hey, we're open to ideas or anyone that wants to reach out and see how we can work together.”

And I just cold-called these police chiefs and said, “Hey, I just watched your presentation and would love to talk about this idea.” And they said, “Well, why don't you get on a plane and fly out here and learn about our department?” And the rest is history because they opened their department to us, opened the slot team, the K-9 unit, the mental health co-responders, the dispatch center. And when you start to look at the onion that is public safety, it touches most of society. It’s in the parks, in the schools, in the hospitals.

The police department knows what's happening in a community, probably better than you because of the information coming in. And we started to be able to paint a picture of not only safety, but ways that they can be more efficient. And I think that's when we started to realize the ROI “aha” moment was data.

We have a lot of police departments that understand now that data is important. They don't necessarily know where to apply it all the time. Some departments can use back-of-the-napkin math and say, “I can pay X amount of money for two crime analysts, which would be limited to these particular functions. But with this application for the same amount of money, I can make all of my officers and employees analysts.

We have some agencies that have reduced their time on domestic violence calls by 15 to 30 minutes by not having to go back and forth to their car, having information immediately available in their hands. And we have some departments that have reduced their time using their traditional research tools by an hour to an hour and a half per officer per shift. Those are full-time employee hours that you're giving back to the community, especially at a time when you can't hire enough police officers.

Roland Siebelink:
Talking back a little bit about your founder journey, what would you say has been the one moment that's felt most like a breakthrough in your startup journey?

Andre McGregor:
Some people joke and say I'm the investor whisperer by being able to understand how to communicate to a prospective investor and your current investors. As a new founder, I remember my first dozen pitches and they were awful in comparison to what they are now. I didn't understand all of the pieces of what they have to evaluate me on in terms of determining if this is a reasonable investment that can return the right amount of equity back to their LPs.

I had no idea about this stuff. Being able to understand how an investor works and then being able to dissect that in a way to say, what's the story of my business and how we're going to make it not only a very impactful social business that saved lives but also return the investment back to the LPs in a way that is meaningful was that leap that I took.

Roland Siebelink:
As you were struggling with that, was it more a question of this investor asked me about pricing, so now I have a pricing slide, and then the next investor asked you about TAM and then you added a TAM slide, or was it more just keep going and after 10, 15, 20 pitches, you're like, “Okay, got to rework the whole thing now.”

Andre McGregor:
Good question. I would say, in the process, we started having general conversations, which I think was not the right pathway because people want to be helpful, which I appreciate. And they're like, “I'll make an introduction to this VC.” And you realize that, “Wait, I wasn't ready for that VC.” And they're at a different level than where I should start. Sometimes it's better to - I don't want to say start with not your top VCs, but essentially identify the VCs for which you're hoping have good traction. But if they say no, you're not going to be absolutely devastated.

Add the conversations with some of the VCs that were able to come back and give advice. “Hey, great idea, but I don't understand this. I don't understand that. I don't understand these different pieces.” Taking notes, and then to your point, I added a slide, “Okay, let me explain the TAM a little bit better. Let me explain how we're going to reach product-market fit. Let me explain how we're going to have world domination.” That's the other term that they like to use - billion ARR and world domination. We're on the path to both.

Roland Siebelink:
Going back to the breakthroughs, this and other breakthroughs you may have experienced in ForceMetrics, how has that over time changed your understanding of the role that you have as a founder and what the company needs most from you?

Andre McGregor:
I would say my journey has definitely gone from being a founder to a CEO in many ways. As a founder, you're in the middle of everything. You're doing a lot of stuff. You're a cheerleader and the first person to pick up a broom. And then you start to add more team members and more team members. As a result, we're a 40-person company now. We have dedicated teams and leaders in those roles.

I'd probably say 30% of my time is investor relations and having conversations not only with my existing but with prospective investors. Another 30% is with customers, both current and future customers, because they still want to see me or they still want to talk to me as the CEO of the company if they have questions or an idea.

I've learned to be like a lawyer where I probably say no more than yes, because if you say yes too many times, in this industry, we're trying to build a car, but they've asked for so many requirements that it's a 747 jet. I thought we were just driving a car. But add this and that.

Roland Siebelink:
Especially if you are the one with the ultimate decision power. That's what I think many founders learn - never be the one in the room that is forced to say yes when there's no higher authority that can veto you.

Andre McGregor:
Right, which is why my sales team has all forbidden me of giving pricing out and a variety of stuff I'm not allowed to do anymore. I used to say things and they’re like, “Don't say that, don't say that.” Same on the product side.

Roland Siebelink:
When I was at Rocket Fuel, one of the three scale-ups I went through that grew from 10 to 1,000 in three years, they had a president and a head of products who were both excellent at pre-selling what wasn't there yet. And they definitely learned very quickly never to have both in the same room with a customer because then they started bidding against each other. And before you know it, they would cut out of the meeting like, “I think they closed it, but what the hell did we sell?”

Andre McGregor:
The nice thing is that we do take a different approach. We underpromise and overdeliver. We want to make sure that once you get it, it works and works much better than you thought it was ever going to be. But then also when we do get a customer that has a good idea, - I'll give you an example. We had a customer that said, “Hey, we want to incorporate license plate reader data, and we want it to be searchable and ForceMetrics. My response was, “Do you want millions of data points just to be available in a search result?” And they're like, “No. What we're looking for is when we have a license plate reader in our city, we'll get 3,000 hits a day, but we can't go after 3,000 cars. We want to find the ones that are the most violent or the ones that are the most concerning. And we need to cross-reference that with the data that you have to see what that is.”

I'm like, “Well, that's a different story. You want an integration that later tells you green, yellow, red. Okay, let me give you a product manager to sit with you.” I don't say yes, I say tell me more.

Roland Siebelink:
Very good life lesson in general, I would say. And maybe talking about life lessons, from all the stuff you've learned in the last four years as a founder, what is, if you had to distill a principle or a lesson from that experience, something that other founders would also apply, what would that be, Andre?

Andre McGregor:
I say don't overcomplicate things.

Roland Siebelink:
What? But we're founders, we're engineers. Come on, that's all we like doing.

Andre McGregor:
I'm sure everyone says that, but it's so easy to overcomplicate things or overthink. And I think at the end of the day, to your point, in terms of was it two and a half years before you had any people using it? No. How fast can I get something out the door, testing it out and iterating and changing. But also doing that at the people level. You're managing risk. There's people risk, as well as technology and economic risks. Break it down to the simple principles because usually it can fit in those buckets and then make a decision. Oftentimes, there's paralysis with indecision or paralysis with complexity.

Roland Siebelink:
I like to apply that to startups themselves as well, because what you just said is, in a way, reduce complexity rather than add to complexity. Simplify things for the folks that are working for you, for example. And I also found in working with startups that just one of the levers people most often - and it helps them the most - is just variable reduction.

How do we take all this complex thinking into what matters most and what do we need to decide on right now? All the rest, and Reed Hoffman's words are, “Fires we can let burn.” Although in law enforcement, maybe that's the wrong analogy to use.

Andre McGregor:
Well, it's funny because we'll get a lot of agencies and departments that will say, “Well, can you add this data set, add this data set, and add this data set?” And I say, “Who's going to use this?” Because now you've added all these different variables. Who's going to be able to understand what they all mean and be able to sift through it? And so they're like, “Yeah.” You're making it for one person and that one person is going to leave you at some point. And then you're going to wonder why you have this thing that sounded great. Again, the 747 that you wanted to be a car, and now you don't know where to park your 747 outside your house.

Roland Siebelink:
But it's so common in tech companies, especially those with more enterprise focus. When you get too dependent on one customer, you start adding all the bells and whistles. And before you know it, you don't have a product anymore but a custom solution.

Andre McGregor:
That and not all customer feedback should be included. Meaning - and I'm a big proponent of Ray Dalio and Bridgewater Associates and principal earn the right to have an opinion. I can have an opinion on cybersecurity, on law enforcement, on technology. I don't have one on trains and a variety of things like that. I haven't earned the right to have that opinion.

Early off, we had one agency where we had one officer that said, “It'd be nice if in your app with the phone number, when you show it for a person, that if I click it, I can call it.” And I'm like, “Well, that makes sense, because you want to find the person.” And then the number of other officers that came back and said, “That's a bad idea. I don't want to call my subject.” This one person, great idea, the rest of the people - we had to get rid of it.

Roland Siebelink:
When you're too much in the weeds as a founder, it's so hard to get out of the complexity. Do you have tips for people? How do you keep that perspective to keep things simple and simple in the eyes of the customer, not only your own eyes?

Andre McGregor:
Yeah, it's interesting because one of the things that we'll do with our application is when we go to a new agency - we're fast and we're easy, not only on the UI/UX side, but also on the implementation side. We have a very small data engineering team. We can get an agency going in hours and days versus weeks and months compared to other people.

We're ingesting tens of millions of records from a lot of these agencies when we do it. But when we do early user adoption, we will go to agencies and we'll say, “Give us your saltiest officer that is going to hate whatever - we want that person.” Why? Because he's going to give us feedback immediately. And then either we're going to iterate and change on it to make sure it works, or we're going to learn the culture that we need to work towards, and then we're gonna win them over.

For us, go headfirst into the bad. I'm not saying that person's bad. I'm just saying that they're gonna be the detractor, the naysayer. But when you do that, you actually see a lot very quickly. You're not waiting months and months for something to surface. They're telling you on day one, “You gotta change this or this ain't gonna work.”

Roland Siebelink:
Andre, how big could this become? You're talking about about 40 people on your team right now. You don't need to share revenue numbers, but how much bigger can this be? How much could your team grow? How much of an impact do you want to have with ForceMetrics over the long run?

Andre McGregor:
In the long run, every police agency, every fire, EMS, animal control needs to have this data at their fingertips. For me, getting it into the 16,000 law enforcement agencies in the US, the additional law enforcement agencies in other countries, is where my focus is.

Roland Siebelink:
Compared to roughly how many do you have now, if I may ask?

Andre McGregor:
We're about 35 right now.

Roland Siebelink:
35, cool. Enough to not be dependent on one of them.

Andre McGregor:
And we've only been selling for about a year. As we continue to grow, we're going to see those numbers. For us, the team's gotta grow. And the interesting thing is our engineering team is slim and lean. And right now, our needs are product because we need to go out in the field and actually build some of this stuff and get requirements.

Our go-to-market and customer success side because we have to always be good to our customer because if we're good to our customer, then they tell their neighboring agency. You can't sit on your hands or sit on your laurels and say, “Okay, we're fine.” We have to actually be out there in the field with them, be in the cop car with them, sit in the dispatch center. Bring the donuts. They do eat donuts. They get mad. They get mad because they're always on a diet, but they'll eat the donuts.

Roland Siebelink:
Last question, what's the breakthrough you're chasing the most right now? Something that's just out of reach but that you're determined to crack.

Andre McGregor:
I would probably say how best to leverage an audio AI assistant in all the data that we're collecting and being able to do in a way to get right back to the beginning statement that you said in the podcast, which is I'm going to be out with a subject and I'm going to pull out my smartphone and I want to have something that I can speak to that's digesting what my ask and then spitting out what it expects that I need to know.

Roland Siebelink:
Almost like they now have the little earphone where they could talk to central but instead they would just talk to their phone.

Excellent. Okay. I love that vision. We are out of time. Andre McGregor, founder and CEO of ForceMetrics, really loved having you on the podcast; really engaging conversation. And I learned a lot about law enforcement and how tech can help them.

Andre McGregor:
Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation, and looking forward to coming back and letting you know where the company sits.

Roland Siebelink:
Last question after the last question is if any law enforcement department is listening or anyone wants to get in touch, where did they go? What do they download? Other than just asking me for an intro, which I'm happy to provide as well.

Andre McGregor:
They can go to forcemetrics.com. They can also email me at [email protected]. and we'll definitely get them the right resources or get them connected with a peer in an agency to answer their questions.

Roland Siebelink:
Thanks again, Andre McGregor, for being on the MidStage Startup Momentum Podcast. And for our listeners, we will have a new episode next week. Stay tuned, everyone.

Outro:
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