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Who we sat down with
Elias Torres sold Drift for $1.2 billion. He calls it the biggest failure of his career.
The reason is a number most founders never look at. Companies spend roughly $1 on software for every $6 on labor, yet pour their budgets into acquiring customers and starve the work of keeping them. At Drift, 200 people supporting the customer base still reached only 4 to 5% of it. The other 95% got a form to fill out.
Torres built Performable and Drift with David Cancel, helped take HubSpot public, and sold Drift to Vista for $1.2 billion. He’s now building Agency, an AI agent company backed by Pat Grady at Sequoia and HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan.
Discussed in this episode
Why a $1.2B exit can still feel like a failure, and what “enduring” actually means
How to rebuild your identity when the title goes away
The Agency thesis: $1B with under 100 people, and how AI agents make it possible
Why Elias runs the whole company on Agency itself, with no CRM
Why sales may be the last role AI eliminates, and what that means for GTM
How to spot investors who lead with value instead of a pitch deck
Why distribution, not product, is the hardest problem in the AI era
What 20+ years building with David Cancel (Performable, HubSpot, Drift) taught him about partnership
Episode highlights
2:25 - Time off, slowing down, and losing the title
4:00 - The inflection point and what comes after a big exit
7:00 - What Agency is and the problem it solves
11:00 - Why he brought people he’s known for years
11:40 - Investors who lead with value (Pat Grady and Brian Halligan)
17:30 - Building with David Cancel for 20+ years
23:00 - The bold claim: $1B with under 100 people
26:00 - The go-to-market motion behind it
28:30 - “Sales is the last role AI will eliminate”
36:00 - High-agency people and how Agency runs itself
42:00 - Building distribution in the AI era
51:00 - Where to find Elias and Agency
Key takeaways
A $1.2B Exit Became His Biggest Failure When the Customers Got Left Behind
The exit every founder dreams about taught Torres the opposite of what the headline suggests.
“the exit or the money is not everything. It’s like nothing changes. You’re the same person the day after.”
The failure wasn’t the price. It was what came after: private equity sold the company, people were let go, and the product he’d built stopped being the thing that served customers. For a founder who measures success by whether customers get value, that’s the loss that stuck.
“To let down the customers, to let down the team.”
Most founders optimize the exit. Torres optimizes endurance, the company that keeps delivering value long after the founder stops being in the room. That reframe is the seed of everything he’s building now.
The money is not the goal. The enduring company is.
Companies Spend $6 on Labor for Every $1 on Software, and Still Reach 5% of Customers
Agency’s entire bet rests on one lopsided ratio.
“you have a dollar in software budgets and then you have $6 in labor.”
That labor line is where the money already is. Companies pour spend into acquisition and leave retention thin, so the customers they fought to win go quietly uncared for. Torres watched it happen at his own scale.
“I had like let’s say 200 people in the organization at Drift to support the customer, and there’s still only tapping and touching maybe like 4 or 5% of their customer base.”
Two hundred people, 5% coverage. That’s not a staffing problem you fix by hiring, it’s a math problem you fix with software that can care for the other 95%. It’s the same opening companies like Sierra are running at, and the budget sitting in that labor line dwarfs the software line founders usually fight over.
“You spend this much in acquisition and you spend this little in retention.”
The budget for the work is already being spent. It’s just going to people, not to caring for customers at scale.
He’s Building to $1B in Revenue With Fewer Than 100 People, and No Titles
Torres wants Agency to reach a billion in revenue with fewer than 100 employees, and he no longer thinks that’s a crazy thing to say.
“constraint is the mother of invention.”
He grew up in Cuba, where 60-year-old cars stay running because nobody gets to buy a new one, and he treats headcount the same way. Companies are already hitting $400 to $500 million in revenue with 200 to 300 people. At Agency, roughly 25 to 30 people this summer, the structure looks nothing like a traditional org.
“80, 90% of the company is engineers. And everybody serves the customer.”
No product managers, no designers, and deliberately no titles, which he calls part of the constraint of staying under 100. He remembers the moment past 100 people at Drift when the meetings turned into levels, reporting lines, and managers of managers, and he’s engineering Agency to never get there.
“Everybody hands on. Nobody can say that’s not my job.”
Titles are what you add when you stop being able to stay close to the customer. Torres is betting he never has to.
Agency Starts on the Customer Side, Not Sales, Because That’s the Last Thing to Automate
When Brian Halligan suggested starting with sales, Torres went the other way on purpose.
“I said, no, I want to start in the customer side.”
The logic came from a line Jack Dorsey gave Sequoia’s portfolio companies, which Torres keeps coming back to.
“sales is the last role that we will eliminate because people want to buy it from a human.”
If sales is the last thing to go, the customer side is the first place agents can do real work, and it’s the place most companies neglect. His picture of the fix is concrete: not a bot that introduces itself and asks for a meeting, but an agent that already knows your workloads, your history, and what you asked for last quarter, and shows up having done the homework. The way he frames it to customers isn’t about cutting the team.
“what are the other 90 things that you wish you could do that you cannot do?”
Don’t sell automation as replacing the ten things a human can do. Sell it as the ninety things they never had time for.
He Built an AI Company and Will Still Tell You Agents Don’t Exist Yet
For someone selling agents, Torres is the first to puncture the hype.
“for as much as we talk about agents, to me, agents don’t really even exist yet.”
Prompting a model to help with a task isn’t an agent, he argues. Reminders and to-do lists aren’t either. His bar is much higher.
“an agent is when you have offloaded all your worries for that workflow, for that role at a company, and you can do it continually at a high rate of success.”
The version he’s chasing is a renewal specialist you hire from Agency: it reads your wiki, your emails, your Salesforce contracts, learns your renewal process, takes over new renewals, and reports back on where pricing needs to change. By his own estimate, a rounding error of businesses are anywhere close. And the bottleneck isn’t the technology.
“humans, we’re the biggest bottleneck to adoption of AI.”
Agency runs on this belief internally. They have no CRM. Their own product is the system of record for every communication, task, and customer follow-up, and their in-house coding agent, named intern, ships integrations in about a day so the whole team can stay forward-deployed with customers.
The tools to build a company have never been cheaper, and Torres will tell you the tools to run one barely exist yet. That gap, caring for every customer at a scale humans never could, is the company he’s building. As he puts it, the legacy is the mission.
Follow Elias Torres
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliast
X (Twitter): https://x.com/eliast
Agency Website: https://www.agency.inc/
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
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