When technology moves faster than the rules governing it, companies and ordinary citizens can both pay the price. We’ve seen versions of this with Uber, Meta, Airbnb, and others. Flock Safety, the company behind an AI-powered license-plate-reader network deployed across thousands of American communities, is the latest example.
Flock is also a Rorschach test. Proponents and opponents can each point to data and case studies supporting their views, and I believe both sides are arguing in good faith. But the debate has moved beyond disagreement over the technology itself. Flock has faced growing bipartisan opposition over the past several months, including:
- Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordering state agencies to halt funding for the cameras after reporting that the state spent more than $30 million on them
- Bernie Sanders planning to introduce legislation to stop Flock’s “AI mass surveillance”
- Greg Steube demanding warrants and Fourth Amendment guardrails
- The Department of Transportation in Florida deciding to remove the license-plate readers from the highway due to “misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes”
- And over fifty agencies and communities across the political spectrum establishing regulations or removing Flock cameras since the beginning of 2026
When lawmakers from very different parts of the political spectrum arrive at similar concerns, it’s worth asking whether something more structural is happening.
Here’s my read: this isn’t really just a privacy scandal. It’s a governance-lag problem. Flock built and fielded a transformative capability faster than any city council, police department, or state legislature could write the policies and procedures to govern it. The technology arrived; the rules did not. In that vacuum, documented cases of misuse quickly came to define the public conversation.
Flock isn’t unique in this respect. The pattern is familiar. Companies from Napster and Juul to Uber, Meta and Airbnb have all faced versions of the same challenge when their technology, products or business models moved faster than the institutions and rules governing them. The circumstances are different, but the underlying lesson is the same. When technology gets too far ahead of governance, companies can find themselves reacting to the rules instead of helping shape them.
The better move is substantive engagement before the crisis. Sit down with your government customers before the deployment scales and help them build the policies, the audit trails, the use restrictions, and the accountability mechanisms that enable them to defend the program in public. Co-author the concept of operations and employment. Make the guardrails part of the pitch. It’s unglamorous, it’s slow, and it doesn’t fit neatly on a growth chart. It’s also the difference between a durable government business and a company that becomes a cautionary tale.
Making Governance Part of the Product
Any time a new technology is introduced into government, the customer has to navigate two processes that rarely (if ever) move at the same speed: how to use the technology and how to govern it.
Defense-technology founders would recognize this instantly. In the military, for example, you don’t give a unit a new piece of gear and walk away to let them figure out the implementation on their own. Instead, you develop a concept of operations and employment. You walk the customer through how the product is used, how to train service members to use it, the logistics needed to sustain it, and more. Serious defense companies treat this as a line of effort inside their go-to-market, not an afterthought, because they know the customer needs help reasoning about a capability that didn’t exist last year. It’s part of the product.
Startups selling into government can easily underestimate this lesson. They book the contract, ship the technology, offer some loosely defined recommendations for use, and assume adoption equals endorsement. It doesn’t. Winning the contract and deploying the product is only a small part of the job.
When a capability is introduced with unknown second- and third-order effects, you’re handing the government a governance problem it isn’t equipped to solve on the same timeline. If you don’t help solve it proactively, early and in the open, someone else will define the terms for you: a journalist, an ACLU campaign, a state attorney general, or a senator holding a hearing.
Civil Society Is Part of the Market
Government isn’t the only actor in the marketplace that matters either. The other party in the room is civil society. Groups like the ACLU and EFF aren’t just critics to be managed; they’re the people who set the terms of the debate you’ll eventually be having anyway. A good example is Flock’s retention. The company’s default recommendation was 30 days of stored plate data. The ACLU’s model legislation outlined roughly 48 hours, a gap wide enough to define the entire fight. That gap didn’t have to become a public battle and probably could have been prevented entirely had Flock substantively engaged the ACLU during product development.
Engaging civil society organizations enables companies to pressure-test their own defaults and consider reasonable guardrails before the issue becomes public debate. An organization that may seem like an adversary at first can offer useful guidelines for building a more defensible product.
You Can’t Retrofit Legitimacy
As scrutiny grows, policy engagement and lobbying may become necessary, but they can’t substitute for trust built through substantive governance work. Flock has reportedly poured more than a million dollars into federal lobbying and roughly another million across statehouses. I’ll say what I said in a different context last week: writing checks is signaling, not strategy, and it’s certainly not a moat. Once the backlash is bipartisan and trust has eroded, lobbying alone can’t rebuild it.
What This Means for Founders
For founders building transformative technologies, governance can’t wait until regulators show up. If government could become a customer, regulator, or market-maker for your company, the work needs to begin well before deployment.
Ask the governance questions alongside the growth and product ones:
- What new capability are we offering? What changes because it exists?
- What policies and guardrails are needed before deployment can scale?
- Where could the technology be misused?
- Who outside government will have a stake in deployment? What may their concerns be?
- Could our customer publicly defend this technology tomorrow?
At MVP Ventures, this is the work we push founders to do early. The companies that win within government treat engagement as a craft.
Flock built something powerful. The lesson for founders is that building the technology is only part of the challenge. Helping government figure out how to live with it responsibly is the other part, and it’s the part you can’t skip.
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