Elon Fired Him, Now His AI Writes Every Police Report | Daniel Francis (Abel Police)

Daniel Francis is the solo founder of Able, an AI-powered software platform that writes police reports from body camera footage, saving officers roughly one-third of their time and, by Daniel’s math, saving approximately one life per year for every 115 officers on the platform. His path to building Able was unconventional: he dropped out of high school, discovered economics through an eccentric professor at a Florida community college, attended Florida State University, taught himself to code at a DC nonprofit (the Mercatus Center), moved to San Francisco, co-built a weightlifting fitness app to $30K MRR, briefly impersonated a laid-off Twitter employee to work for Elon Musk (who later fired him, then called to apologize), and then had a religious conversion to Catholicism—all before founding Able.

The insight that started Able: Daniel helped a friend escape an abusive marriage in Oakland and interacted with a police officer who was apologetic about a 45-minute response time, explaining the agency was short-staffed and overwhelmed. That officer’s empathy made Daniel want to build something for police. He then discovered a 2021 SFPD staffing analysis showing officers spend one-third of their time writing reports—which struck him as absurd given they wear body cameras. That became the core product thesis.

Why Daniel is a solo founder by conviction:

• He tried co-founding twice and found it intolerable—the second partnership “immediately blew up” with distrust and tension. He realized he was giving away 50% equity to someone he thought was wrong most of the time and couldn’t fire.
• He contrasts this with his founding engineers, who get 5% equity and can be terminated: “I could get 10 of those. That’s a way better situation.”
• He believes engineers and smooth-talking idea people should go solo; co-founders of convenience are far more common than true partnerships, and the rare successful ones (like those who met in undergrad) are built on years of deep trust he never had access to as an econ major whose friends went into policy and actuarial work.
• The bear case for solo founding: if you have a huge blind spot—like no design sense, no product intuition, or an unwillingness to do sales—you shouldn’t go solo. “If you don’t want to pick up the phone, don’t even start a company. You’re not serious enough.”

The case for solo founding:

• You don’t have to carry a co-founder’s “dead body up a mountain.” For 50% equity you can instead hire an army of people you can fire at will.
• Authorship and coherence: Daniel named the company Able (the first victim of a crime in the Bible) and believes solo founders produce more coherent products because one mind drives the entire experience—he cites Apple under Jobs as the archetype, versus Google’s fragmented product landscape. “You transfer your mind model to someone else through the software.”
• He transitioned from sole author to “primary author plus editor” as he hired, accepting “stray threads” (like a dropdown in the wrong spot) as the cost of scaling, but found that managing great engineers gave him “thousand X leverage” over coding alone.

Culture at Able is deliberately anti-culture:

• The “Working at Able” document states Daniel must be the “floor on engineering talent and the ceiling on being an asshole.” People who violate either standard are fired.
• There are no parties, no forced bonding. “The culture is: here’s the deadlines, here’s the tickets, hurry up, move.” Engineers love it because the stakes are real—everyone at Able has done a police ride-along to understand what policing is actually like.
• Daniel’s emotional intensity about quality (he monitors error channels on his phone and sends notes when things break) sets a tone where mission-critical reliability is non-negotiable. “If the software is 10% worse and we’ve got 1,100 people on the platform, you just killed someone.”

Finding the first agency was grueling:

• Daniel needed unredacted body cam footage to build the product and had to embed with a real department. He was rejected by most agencies—including SFPD, where he got stuck in red tape all the way up to the CIO.
• He literally printed flyers and drove around the East Bay like a “little boy scout” pitching departments. Most thought the idea of AI writing police reports was legally questionable or sacrilegious given the sanctity of the police report as a document.
• Richmond PD was the breakthrough: an understaffed, suffering agency whose admin captain watched a demo (using fake body cam footage Daniel recorded holding his phone to his chest) and said, “That was bitchin’. You have got to do that here.” Richmond’s pain—officer burnout, 60-hour weeks, strained city council relations—made them the ideal early adopter.

Ride-alongs as product research:

• Daniel has done 39 ride-alongs. The first one feels like being hosted; by the fourth ride-along with the same officer, they open up about real problems—sergeant dysfunction, broken processes, how agencies actually fail.
• Every Able employee must do a ride-along after joining (and is told this before accepting). Daniel argues you cannot understand policing from a five-minute description—it’s a “foreign interface for reality”—and that firsthand exposure is essential for building something useful.

Religious conversion and mission alignment:

• After selling his shares in the fitness app, Daniel experienced a period of aimlessness and what he describes as postpartum depression. He had already concluded God was real but didn’t know what to do with it, having grown up Southern Baptist and rejected that worldview.
• Walking around San Francisco’s North Beach, he noticed Catholic churches are open all day (unlike Protestant ones), began praying at Saints Peter and Paul, met the sacristan, learned Catholic prayers, attended mass for the first time, and felt an immediate sense of recognition (“blood memory” given his Irish heritage). He went through RCIA and became a devout Catholic.
• He consulted his priest before committing to Able and received blessing for the mission of restoring order in a fallen world. He holds the minority Catholic view that Catholics have a duty to win—to build big companies, accumulate wealth and influence, and direct it toward good. “The world would be a much better place if the people running large companies were Catholics.”
• He keeps his faith private in professional settings (never opens meetings with prayer) but says it fundamentally orients the company’s direction: “You cannot be a Catholic and start Pornhub.”

The Elon Musk effect on Daniel’s mission:

• Working at Twitter under Elon, Daniel asked if Musk felt weird firing people. Musk replied: “No. What we’re doing here matters. If they’re in the way, they have to go.” This resonated deeply with Daniel and shifted him from building mercenary lifestyle businesses to pursuing something with life-or-death stakes.
• He returned from Twitter, told his fitness app partners he might “run off and join Twitter again,” they told him to exit the business, and he sold his shares—then committed fully to policing.