To successfully build for law enforcement, founders need more than surface-level market research. The advice is to gain firsthand experience through extensive ride-alongs or even becoming a reserve officer. This deep immersion is critical for understanding the culture, speaking the language, and building truly effective solutions.

Peregrine's 'Forward Deployed Engineer' model requires psychologically co-owning the customer's problem to drive outcomes. Success hinges on deep empathy and suspending ego to understand complex institutional context, a nuance Silicon Valley's 'move fast' culture often misses, where it can come across as ego.

Police are paradoxically resistant to change while also being dissatisfied with current conditions. This creates a challenging but navigable path for technology adoption. Founders must frame innovations as inevitable, beneficial evolutions rather than disruptive shifts to succeed in this market.

While customer feedback is vital for identifying problems (e.g., 40% of 911 calls are non-urgent), customers rarely envision the best solution (e.g., an AI voice agent). A founder's role is to absorb the problem, then push for the technologically superior solution, even if it initially faces resistance.

Periods of market confusion, where established players don't know what to do next, are the best times for entrepreneurs. Those who can navigate ambiguity and trust their intuition can find and exploit opportunities while competitors are paralyzed by uncertainty.

Instead of aligning with pro-police or pro-accountability factions, Axon focused on a universally accepted goal: reducing deaths involving police. This unifying message allowed the company to secure growth across different political administrations, providing a playbook for navigating and thriving in politically charged markets.

In the divisive public safety market, Axon's philosophy is not to impose its own policy views. Instead, its product teams focus on creating flexible tools with the right "knobs and dials." This empowers individual police departments to implement policies appropriate for their specific communities, making the product adaptable and widely adoptable.

The best way for entrepreneurs to find a meaningful problem in the defense sector is not through research papers but by directly engaging with end-users. The advice is to go to naval bases, listen to the pain points of sailors and marines, and identify high-impact challenges worth solving.

To deeply understand law enforcement's needs, Peregrine's co-founders embedded themselves in a police department, acting as free labor. This "method acting" approach allowed them to learn the job's subtleties, identify real pain points, and eventually build a targeted solution from firsthand experience.