Elias Torres, Co-Founder and CEO @ Agency: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company

Elias Torres calls Drift’s $1.2B exit his biggest failure and argues elephants cannot dance, only sing.

• Torres considers Drift his biggest life failure despite the $1.2B exit — product stagnated, grew to 800 people, and became unsalvageable without a Twitter-scale restructuring.
• He made ~$2M in 6–7 months consulting for OpenAI’s enterprise customers before founding Agency, charging up to $500K per contract.
• Torres was an early investor in Klaviyo and claims he convinced founder Andrew Bialecki to take VC money; still holds the stock.
• His current company Agency has 15 people, zero 1-on-1 meetings, and one daily all-hands — he views 200-person CS teams as the target customer replacing $30M headcount with AI agents.
• On incumbents: Google invented the Transformers paper but can’t ship working products; Microsoft co-pilot wins via distribution, not product quality; ChatGPT is the real king but not the end state.
• Torres believes AI productivity gains will take 5–10 years to materialize broadly, not 12–24 months — most industries adopt slower than tech, and tech itself is slow.
• Hiring approach: contract-first to filter candidates, reject intensely to test resilience, hire Northeastern co-op students in batches, fire in the first two weeks rather than waiting.

2025-03-21 · Watch on YouTube