Elias Torres wants to reach unicorn status with just 100 employees

ELIAS TORRES: We’re at a peak moment in the history of the world of society, especially around business.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: Mm-hmm. In what way?

TORRES: This is the most humans will ever have at companies servicing the customer. They will never be more from this day on.

EL KALIOUBY: Elias Torres is the kind of person who speaks in definitives. He’s direct, innovative and future thinking. These qualities make him a successful founder.

In this episode, Elias and I talk about his latest venture – a B2B company called Agency, which helps businesses leverage AI in customer interactions. What I find especially interesting is how he’s building his company – Elias is trying to reach unicorn status with only 100 employees. It’s a lofty goal, but considering his track record, it seems possible. He’s a Hubspot veteran and sold one of his companies, Drift, to private equity for 1.2 billion dollars.

But our conversation covered so much more than just business.

We talked about Elias’s immigrant story and how that experience shaped his career.

TORRES: Maybe because I’m an immigrant, maybe because I always took care of my family and my siblings and my mother, like, I’ll take care of this problem. I’m a wartime CEO.

EL KALIOUBY: We covered the American Dream, and if it’s still alive.

TORRES: I came to the United States trying to conquer the United States. I did it. And now I’m like, the food here is poisonous. No, we’re not healthy. Too stressful. Too much work. And I go back to Nicaragua and it’s a paradise.

EL KALIOUBY: And we also explored how AI is changing our ideas of what a fulfilling career looks like.

TORRES: I think that’s what it means to be human right, is to be authentic. To be, I’m doing this because I want to.

EL KALIOUBY: I’m Rana el Kaliouby and this is Pioneers of AI – a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution. Hi, Elias. Thank you for joining me today. I’m so excited for our conversation.

[THEME MUSIC]

TORRES: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

EL KALIOUBY: It’s gonna be fun.

TORRES: Let’s make it fun.

Copy LinkHow an immigrant journey shaped ambition and resilience

EL KALIOUBY: So before we dive into AI, I actually wanna start with the human. This has kind of been my journey, like human centered AI, and I wanna start with one particular human, your mom. You have a podcast on the side, the American Dream. And I was listening to your interview with your mom for Mother’s Day, and I just thought it was really heartwarming. My mom has played a huge role in my life as well. We’re both immigrants to the United States, so I just wanted, I wanted to start there. Tell us more about your story, your, how you got here.

TORRES: Well, I got here because of my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She came to the United States, crossed the river El Rio Grande. So like the true, like she just, she was 65 years old. Got on a bus, walked, I have no idea what she did in 1975.

And she got to family in San Francisco. And she from there, as an illegal immigrant, found her ways to learn about community and helping the Latino community, became some sort of activist, I don’t know. But she ended up getting her green card. Okay. Asylum did this in her later years. And because of her, she was able to ask for my mother and my siblings to come to United States with a green card, right? And so we waited like 10 years.

EL KALIOUBY: Oh my God.

TORRES: From 1983 to 93. That was the process. And I can’t believe that happened. No internet, nothing. And one day my mother goes like.

We’re moving to United States, and I was just so excited. The American Dream was like, just, I didn’t even know it was called the American Dream, but it was like in me, like, mom, we’re going to go, we’re gonna work, we’re gonna do this together. We’re gonna, we’re gonna build a home. And we just, it was, I was so fired up, 17 years old.

And first thing we did, it was like, I always tell the story. I cleaned offices, I was vacuuming, I was coming at night with my mother. But that was my story. That’s, I always say that. And then my mom on the podcast goes. You only did it once.

EL KALIOUBY: Right. It’s out there now.

TORRES: It’s out there. So I did it once. Worked at McDonald’s, worked at a grocery store, Albertson’s.

EL KALIOUBY: Then your dad somehow got you access to an IBM.

TORRES: That was early on. There was a seventh grade time when I was in LA I visited and he got this computer. He would buy stolen stuff. We don’t know where this things come from. Okay. Kind of. We don’t ask.

EL KALIOUBY: No ask. Yeah.

TORRES: Just don’t worry about it. But everybody’s looking for a deal, right? And so you get this thing. And so she’s like, I bought a computer, is in the garage. I had no idea what it was. My only connection to it looks like a typewriter. That became a little bit my obsession. I don’t know why. I just loved it, even though I didn’t do much with it.

I just kind of like fell in love with it. I just love the idea of doing things more efficiently.

Copy LinkWhy early exposure to technology can change a life

EL KALIOUBY: So that kind of, that exposure to this early IBM computer kind of, kind of sets you on this journey to fall in love with technology and kind of pursue a career in tech.

And I always like, we’re both parents and I always think about my role as like a chief possibility officer or chief exposure officer for my kids. How do you, how do you make sure or ensure that your kids are kind of at the forefront of AI and technology in general, but AI specifically.

TORRES: My kids are older now, right? So I just graduated this past weekend. My youngest out of high school.

EL KALIOUBY: Oh my God.

TORRES: Right. And so he’s gonna do CS. Actually, all three of my kids are CS. Yeah. Yeah, it is.

EL KALIOUBY: How did you do that? I am not able to get my kids — uh, maybe my son. There’s hope. My daughter’s just not a—

TORRES: Detective. All three did it. I don’t know what they’re going to do. Right. Everything is changing. I don’t know what their real passions is, but I’m glad, I think this goes back to your question, right. Of like, how do we expose them to things? Mm-hmm. And I’m biased, right? I think having CS under your belt, it’s like the ultimate superpower, right? It’s like it just teaches you that we can do anything. That that’s the feeling to.

EL KALIOUBY: Technology as a tool to do anything.

TORRES: We can build anything. And so it’s like, especially now, in a distributed, on an online world, and especially with LLMs, it’s the ultimate superpower. I know everybody’s excited because they can go to Loveville, they can go to, and like, I can build an app, but really understanding how it works and just understanding that you’re responsible for building it from the, and you can, if it breaks, you can go and fix it, right.

And just demystify that, but have enough ability to do that, I think is the most, so I’m really happy and excited that they’re doing that, but they might end up choosing different paths, different combinations, and I’m encouraging. That’s kind of been my shift now to be like, my daughter makes CS with design.

EL KALIOUBY: Awesome.

TORRES: My second son is PCS, probably AI. Mm-hmm. Obviously writing. And then my youngest is the most creative. He’s a painter. He is a drawer. Cool. He’s sports. He likes physics, kind of. So I’m encouraging him being like, mix it with whatever else.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. I like this idea of combining kind of a computer science degree with something that you’re really passionate about. Exactly.

Copy LinkWhy the American dream still rewards high agency people

Okay. So before we move on to kind of your entrepreneurial journey, do you think the American dream is dead?

TORRES: Today is alive, right? I think it’s alive. I think we are going to need it more and more. I can’t think negatively, but this is what’s gonna happen to the United States. I have to, I am worried in general about society. I think people want answers. People want solutions. I think what we need is more like. People want to fix things. And there is a lot of hope. I think that there should be. But I think the dream is alive. Our culture is of an immigrants of entrepreneurs, of rule breakers. Yeah. Of, we take high agency people that have ambition and aspiration, and they don’t take no for an answer. And so that creates room, right? It might not be equal. It might not be equal, but there’s still more room here than there is anywhere in the world.

EL KALIOUBY: When we come back we’ll dive into Elias’s self-made entrepreneurial journey and learn why he devoted his career to improving customer experience. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkWhat pushed him from big tech into startup building

EL KALIOUBY: Elias worked at IBM for years as a software engineer, but he wanted to do more. He first co-founded a company called Performable which he sold to Hubspot.

He then eventually co-founded Drift, which helps companies better service customers through more direct and engaging conversations. Mind you – he founded this company BEFORE the gen AI explosion.

And after nearly a decade, in 2021 he sold the company to Vista Equity for 1.2 billion dollars. I wanted to know why he decided to sell and why in spite of such a successful exit, he still wanted to start a new company.

TORRES: Well, 2008 I quit IBM to join David Cancel. I wanna be in the startup world. ’cause after 10 years at IBM, I’m like, tied up in there. I’m going crazy. It doesn’t, it doesn’t work. Like nothing’s getting—

EL KALIOUBY: Nothing’s getting done.

TORRES: Nobody cares. I think that to me is the most, apathy. It just kills me. Right. I only wanna be with people that care. Mm-hmm. And so I go into the startup world and it’s like working with David and it’s like intensity all the way. Right. Say, so we did a company called Lookery. Then we’d start another company called Performable. We sell that to HubSpot. Three years at HubSpot. We take HubSpot public, a billion dollar company. And once you do that. It just felt too easy. Hmm. So we’re like—

EL KALIOUBY: We can do this again. Yeah.

TORRES: But that’s the beauty of it. It’s like, it’s like everything. In retrospect, one of my biggest advice that I would give to people would be like, nothing is as hard as you think it. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s not as hard as you think. It’s like, I think when people just like block themselves, they become their—

EL KALIOUBY: Self-limiting. Yeah. Totally. Yeah.

TORRES: And so, like, yeah, and I’m not gonna discount how much luck has to do in my life, but we did that and then we came out and we said, how hard could it be if we did this with HubSpot? We grew it from 35 million in revenue to 135 in three years. What, can we do this again? And then you start breaking down like, okay, how many customers to get to a hundred million in revenue, depending on what they pay. Right. It’s like 83,000 MRR.

EL KALIOUBY: Monthly recurring revenue.

TORRES: Yeah. Yeah. And so then we’re like. How many thousand dollars deals or how many a hundred dollars deals, or how many $10,000 deals you need, eight, $10,000 deals a month. All this is doable, right? And so we just came out with that mentality, David and I, and it was really hard, right? I mean, it took us like two years of wondering, we call it, through the desert, to figure out what would generate such a thing. And so that’s the journey that I was at Drift. I think we found something which was really AI before AI, which was automating, people have this websites and they have no one there to respond. You fill out a form. Contact us. Right. And nobody responds. Yeah. And so we were like, what if an AI agent could like talk to you in real time and like in real time, book a meeting, route you to the right sales rep, ask you the right questions.

And so we were doing that automated on the website.

EL KALIOUBY: Wait, before LLMs—

TORRES: Way before LLMs, way before the LLM. Right. We were using Bert, we were using all the different models before the LLM came fully together. And we made a lot of mistakes and so. I kind of like took an opportunity. When the offer came, I engaged and I did not hesitate. A lot of people were like telling me, Elias, look how much money you’re gonna make if you are $2 billion. And you could be that in a few months. But that was September 21. January 21, 22, the tech world—

EL KALIOUBY: Collapsed. Right.

TORRES: And so everybody got left holding the bag, but we exited. We were done at that time. And private equity is amazing because they buy you for cash. And you’re not waiting for sellouts and IPOs and stuff like that. So I call it sometimes like my biggest failure, because like everything else, I think I exceeded the expectations, but this, my expectations were higher than where we ended up. And even—

EL KALIOUBY: Though you did very well financially, but like emotionally. Yeah.

TORRES: Emotionally, I felt like, I think as I’m getting older, like I want. I want some sort of legacy now. Mm-hmm.

Copy LinkWhy success can still feel unfinished without a legacy

EL KALIOUBY: That drive to build a legacy, eventually led to his current company: Agency AI.

Right after ChatGPT came out, Elias spoke with a mentor about what to do next. He was financially secure after selling his company. But his mentor thought Elias still had one more company in him.

His new company offers a way for businesses to leverage AI tools to create a better customer experience.

As for what that looks like on the ground, Elias says it’s constantly evolving. There are so many different directions AI can take you. And it’s not always easy to cut out the noise.

TORRES: I talk a big game on LinkedIn, but the reality is that it’s hard. It’s hard.

Copy LinkHow to focus AI on the full customer experience

EL KALIOUBY: Why is it hard? Because there’s so much competition or—

TORRES: So much noise, a fog of war out there. People are trying to figure out what to do with AI and there’s a lot of stuff like, look, it can generate a video, Oh look, it looks, and people are distracted by that. And so—

EL KALIOUBY: How do you drive real value?

TORRES: How do you really scale? And so the idea is that you have to think about the full scope of the challenge of the problem. So to me it’s. It’s the overall customer experience. That’s what I’m solving for.

EL KALIOUBY: Not just customer support. I think actually that’s a really important distinction. Your agents aren’t just coming in at the point where a customer needs to solve a problem. You’re thinking about the entire customer—

TORRES: Entire experience. As long as there are businesses around, we’re gonna have to deliver experience. And that’s what I wanna solve, right? That’s what I wanna solve for. That’s what I wanna build. I have no boundaries. I have no rules. Is the customer experience.

EL KALIOUBY: Well, I remember when we were together at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference, you pulled up agency and I guess agency is there to support you even as a CEO of a company, to like track. Who are the customers you’re talking to? What are their needs? Like, that struck me in that conversation. It was like a one-stop shop for all things customer related. Mm-hmm. Is that kind of the vision?

TORRES: Yeah, we have to build companies with less people now than we ever did. Right. I mean, like, I’m living that, right. I mean, like, we can’t, I made a promise and I said to Sequoia when we did the seed round that I was gonna get to a billion in revenue with no more than 100.

EL KALIOUBY: How many people are at the company today?

TORRES: Like 15.

EL KALIOUBY: What’s the breakdown of that team, by the way?

TORRES: Uh, let’s say 12 engineers and three non-engineers.

EL KALIOUBY: Interesting. Okay. And then a lot of AI.

TORRES: And a lot of AI. Okay. I’ve never seen code written so fast, ever in my life. Hmm. Right. And it is like, people are asking me like, if you have 10 engineers and without AI, they can do X, but if you have AI, those can do 10x. So do you go to one engineer because you can do the same, do you keep the 10 right. Or do you hire another 10? Which one is it?

EL KALIOUBY: Which one is it? Which path are you on?

TORRES: I want to go faster. Yeah. Right. So I’ll hire another 10 and do twice as much as the other 10 with AI. Right. And so do more with AI.

EL KALIOUBY: Interesting.

TORRES: And so you gotta start things earlier and you have to try ’em out and you have to build more and you have to experiment in parallel multiple times and faster because the world is changing. And right now is the most chaotic moment with AI. If you can get there before that might give you a huge advantage.

EL KALIOUBY: After a short break, Elias and I talk about the personalities of AI agents. And why Agency’s agent isn’t nice. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkWhat it takes to build AI agents with real context

EL KALIOUBY: So we love on this show to take our listeners behind the. And kind of, try to unpack a little bit, like how do you build AI products. So I wanna go there next, like what ki like how do you train these AI agents? What data do you use? Do you get access to customer data? So take us behind the scenes a bit.

TORRES: So what happens right now is that I think we’ve been, society civilization has been changing to be more and more comfortable in recording and capturing the information. The reality is that we make zero use of that data.

EL KALIOUBY: Of that data. Yeah. Right. We’ve been only, the most that we keep track is money. Mm-hmm. Right. And maybe page visits to your product. Or we track this data in silos.

TORRES: Yeah. But we just track very basic quantitative stuff. And so what people haven’t realized is with the advent of LLMs, you can start analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data together. Right? And so that’s the first step. Mm-hmm. That’s, I’m, spilling my alpha here. Right. And it’s like there’s all this information that is sitting there and people are making no action whatsoever. And so what I found out is that the LLMs in this world of customers are really. Already more powerful than we need to do the work is the creativity of what problem we’re solving. How do we deliver it?

Put it in the hands of the existing users. Mm-hmm. And then more importantly, how do we put it in the hands of the customer. Yeah. Of the end customer. This is like a innovation product development problem and salesmanship, and be able to go and talk to customers and assure them that it’s okay to give, for them to give you your, their data.

Yeah. Those are problems that always been there. And people are becoming a little bit more accepting. But I do believe that humans are the biggest roadblock to our own success. Yeah. Yeah. Like, they’re like, don’t wanna adapt it.

EL KALIOUBY: It’s a cultural challenge. Like the adoption of these new technologies.

TORRES: AI is completely different. Mm-hmm. And when I see people saying, people respond to me, it’s like, it’s faster for me to use Gmail and just reply to my customers. It definitely baffles me that people don’t see the potential and the opportunity to do more. Right. And to do it better.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Well we were talking offline about the importance of context. Yeah. Too, right? Like when you’ve got all this data, how do you, that that’s what humans kind of do well, I mean, if you’re really paying attention, you kind of can incorporate the context. So how are you thinking about that? How do you bring context into the, into the agent’s answer I guess.

TORRES: Well, I think that that’s like the secret sauce.

I think the application layer and solving problems is where it’s at. Mm-hmm. It’s not simple. It’s gonna be a tremendous battle with open eye, open eye.

And it’s made it clear they’re not sitting still. Yeah. And they’re gonna go into the enterprise, they’re gonna go into everything, but they cannot do everything. And they cannot serve every customer, like if it’s their first. And so it gives room for companies like mine to be like, I’m gonna go listen to my customers.

I’m gonna solve their problems. Yeah. Because every business is gonna have to transform themselves in order to survive. And so I think that what matters is like knowing what questions to ask—

EL KALIOUBY: The AI.

TORRES: —the AI, yeah. To ask of AI. And so, and then also there’s a lot of lack of like, what’s the context that you give to the AI? Right. You can’t just—

EL KALIOUBY: —the background, right.

TORRES: It’s the background, is the data, is the communications with the customers, which customers, the tools, how to go and set it and tell it who you want the AI to be. Yeah. What is their role for that function, for that problem, for that question.

EL KALIOUBY: Do you think at all about like kind of the brand or the personality of the AI agent that’s kind of, I spent like 20 years of my life kind of building emotional intelligence into machines and thinking about that, does that factor into—

TORRES: Absolutely. Are your AI agents nice?

EL KALIOUBY: Are they?

TORRES: They’re a little — I would say not nice, but they’re sometimes nice, and sometimes not. They’re direct. Yeah. They wanna get the problem solved. Right. And so that’s something that I think people don’t realize. I guess I’m also spilling a little alpha here. Right. David Holes said something about he made me journey output images the way he liked.

EL KALIOUBY: Interesting. So he brought a bit, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s kind of gonna be shaped by the humans building the AI.

TORRES: Right. That’s the context. Right. And so he tweaked the style and the default settings of the images coming outta midjourney to his taste. And when I heard him, I said, wow. That’s a way to create a mode, right? Yeah. People use agency today and everybody asks me, can you make sure that it learns the tone of this customer success manager, this sales rep, and how they speak and how they send that message. You know what my answer is?

EL KALIOUBY: What’s your answer?

TORRES: You really want to use the tone of every single person that works at your company. Do you think everybody is great? Is that really what you want? And so people don’t know what they’re asking. This goes back to first principles. Yeah. What do I want? I want one tone.

EL KALIOUBY: Right. That’s consistent.

TORRES: Is consistent. Brand with the company, right? And who is the brand of the company?

EL KALIOUBY: The founder.

TORRES: The founder, right. Somebody. Right. So somebody has to be picked. Yeah. To say, we want to emulate this person. That’s what makes it unique. Right. And so right now, an agency, like, believe it or not, it’s like it’s my tone in the emails. It’s the way I write my emails. Yeah. And people, when our system starts sending emails to their customers on their behalf, they’re always like, I like this. I would send this email. And it’s what, it’s my 50 years of experience in business of how do I, what I’m saying, what I’m asking for, And so we’re still back to the old marketing automation sequences or something. And so it’s my personality put into it. Yeah. Right. And people are like, I don’t, when I typed that in Chad BDI—

EL KALIOUBY: —you get the same. It’s cringey. You can tell it’s AI. But these ones are not. Right. Yeah.

Copy LinkHow founder taste shapes AI personality and product quality

Let’s go back to like building this kind of an AI native company, right? Yeah. For folks who are listening on the show, who are starting companies and they’re thinking about how to, how to bring AI and be AI first, what’s your advice? Like what’s one tool you use that’s like really key? Do you go to AI first before you hire people? Like give us some tips on how to build an AI first company.

TORRES: Well, I think that one is that you have to hire people that no longer think of themselves as having only one role.

EL KALIOUBY: Interesting. Right? Okay. Mm-hmm.

TORRES: It’s like, everybody should, it’s like you have to have people, high agency people is what I look for, right? Because they have opinions, all the engineers, they have opinions on graphics, on website, on story, on pitches, right? We’re all using our own product. And so everybody has to be able to give feedback. Everybody has to be willing to do more than one function and not just be like, this is not my job. Right. And so, for example, like hire a lawyer.

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. Interesting.

TORRES: Yeah, I have a lawyer on staff. Right. And she’s like, so open-minded and willing to learn. She is, she was doing a drift, a lot of the security conversations. So she’s been exposed to security for a while and she’s like, and I’m like, I don’t have time for this. And so like, you’re in charge of security. Mm-hmm. Imagine I have a lawyer that worries about data retention. That’s awesome. Data encryption, data sharing, privacy.

So it’s just something that you might not think back to the combination of majors, right? Yeah. That it was gonna be a great advantage. Right. Right. So when you have somebody like that, right. That. She’s so high agency that she’s like, I hate having you on the calls to answer security calls. I’ll just take care of it.

I’ll take care of this. That’s awesome. So she’s taking all my recordings of all my security calls that my CTO and I have had with customers. Put all the recordings into like, she has like a notebook, LLM that she’s done herself and just streamlining her process just to do one aspect of her job. Right. Yeah. And we don’t need to hire a security person. And so it’s like, that’s kind of like the mindset is the mindset is that we can do anything. And we don’t need a large team to do so.

Copy LinkWhy the future belongs to adaptable people with initiative

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. So let’s talk about what that means for jobs. And I wanna make it real. So both of us have kids that are graduating. My daughter just graduated college and she’s, one of the theses around AI in particular, is that entry level jobs are gonna go away or gonna be really reduced. How do you, how do you see that world? What’s your advice for your daughter?

TORRES: It goes back to what I was saying that. It’s about having agency. What I ask most for my children is that they wanna get up and do something. Mm-hmm. I see motivated to do, I see a lot of people at all ages not having the energy to do something. I don’t have a path because I think all paths are being broken down to pieces. There’s no more like, I’m gonna be at this firm and I’m gonna go take this step and this promotion and this, that, and I’m an entrepreneur at heart, so I kind of like, and they’re kind of like me, my kids, most of them, right? They’re like, they’re different slightly. My daughter especially, she has to be her own boss.

So that I’ve taught them that they should have the freedom. I’m not putting a number or a goal or a size in their mind. Just want them to do something.

EL KALIOUBY: That they’re passionate about and like—

TORRES: Don’t know about the passion. Passion is a lot of bullshit too. It takes time to be passionate. Right. You can’t just be passionate early on. When you do something for 10 years, tell me if you’re passionate. Right. But I just wanted to do something to have initiative. If they want to get a job somewhere, fantastic, go get a job. I think people are going to be looking for this type of people. The ones that have grit, that have high agency. Mm-hmm. The ones that wanna go solve the problems because we have infinite problems in the world. Right.

That’s the bottom line. But if there’s a path or a career or like a title or like a, like a specific goal, like I have no idea what’s going to happen and I think is gonna be grim, I think is for those people that are want an easy, it’s kinda like college, right? People thought, okay, if I do college, if I do a better school, then I’m all set. Right?

EL KALIOUBY: Right. Do an MBA, I’m all set. That’s, that hasn’t been true for a long time.

TORRES: It’s an exciting world, but it’s for people that want to take action, right? Yeah.

EL KALIOUBY: That’s what you need to teach your kids. That’s why I ask myself, how do we teach people to have high agency? I love that. That’s really what it’s about.

Yeah. I love that. That’s a great way to end our conversation. Thank you for joining.

TORRES: No problem. This was great.

EL KALIOUBY: One of my key takeaways from this conversation is that, yes, AI can help us accomplish more with fewer resources, but the mindset behind how we use it is just as important. Technology still depends on our ideas, creativity, and direction. Those who harness AI and combine it with what they already do well are the ones most likely to thrive.