Revolutionizing Customer Success with Agency’s Elias Torres

**Sarah** (0:06)
Hello, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we've got Elias Torres with us, repeat entrepreneur and CEO of Agency, which is working on enabling every company to make their customers successful. Elias is no stranger to entrepreneurship. He's founded four companies, led engineering at the Juggernaut SaaS Company HubSpot, and most recently sold his last business, Drift, for more than a billion dollars to Vista Equity Partners. Elias, welcome.

**Elias Torres** (0:30)
It's a pleasure. It's been a dream of mine to be here with you.

**Sarah** (0:33)
You're doing company number five. Can you just talk a little bit about who you are, getting to this place?

**Elias Torres** (0:39)
Yeah, absolutely. The journey, I think for me, is what's interesting bits about it. I'm from Nicaragua, so I came first generation, could not speak English, right? Imagine me at the back of a McDonald's, reading the printouts, to founder number five, three times with Sequoia, and great outcomes, IPOs, et cetera. It's been an incredible journey, right? I worked at IBM for 10 years, and then I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just could not be inside of IBM. I needed to be free. I needed to have a chance of huge impact.
And so here I am, I'm in Boston. That's another interesting bit, right? I'm not in the Valley. I came to Florida from Nicaragua, and then I had a shot at IBM in the Northeast, and I've been here ever since.

**Sarah** (1:26)
You know, one tidbit I will insert, because I feel like the tech community has somehow discovered that smart kids who end up in tech often do math competitions growing up. This has been going on a long time, guys. Elias, you were one of the math competition kids.

**Elias Torres** (1:41)
I was in math competition. I wish I would be like an Andres or something like that, right? But yes, we're talking, let's say, 1992, 91 This is Nicaragua. But I get picked somehow to represent the school nationally at these competitions, right? I placed third in the country. It's not a great accomplishment, but the point you're making is that math is fundamental to this, and the ability and the thinking is applicable. And when I came to the United States, I'm in a low-income town in Tampa, Florida, low-income school, public school. And somehow, again, I don't speak English, but somehow the math teacher says, do you want to be in math competitions? Mu Alpha Theta. And I'm like, sure, I'll join the nerd club. And I'm like, just had a blast there.
I did have a lot of trouble with the word problems, but I was able to do well in the other ones.

**Sarah** (2:36)
I want to talk a little bit about the last two journeys, because HubSpot is a company that everybody knows that is an important public enterprise, SaaS business now. And you've done leadership at different scales. Coming out of even the success of HubSpot where you were leading engineering, why go start Drift?

**Elias Torres** (3:00)
I think my whole life has been a journey of not having any clue what's ahead or what's possible. Like, I mean, that math competition I had in Nicaragua to go to compete in Mexico, representing my country and meeting kids from all over Latin America was like mind boggling. Then I come to the United States, then I'm in Florida, and then you start like, you know, I don't know, like MIT and stuff like that. So there's always like more. It's just been fun not knowing what's ahead until you get there. And taking HubSpot public, when Brian Halligan came to me and bought my company Performable, so he's like, our goal is to take it public in the next year or two. I had no clue what taking a company public meant. I mean, we had 30 million in revenue, 200 employees when he said those things. Brian says, you're in charge. You and David can do anything you want with product and engineering. We got to go public. And so on my mind is like, okay, we go in public, but I have no idea what going public means.
That naiveté is great, right? We go public, a billion dollar company, three years. Everything was great. We went from 30 to 130 million. I said, if Brian can do this, why can I do this too?

**Sarah** (4:13)
Right?

**Elias Torres** (4:13)
It should be easy to go from zero to 100 million. And that's why I left HubSpot, really. I was so naive thinking that was going to be easy.

**Sarah** (4:22)
Well, you were not so naive that it didn't work, right? So, your last company, Drift, it sold for more than a billion dollars, and you could do it. And yet, you told me you think of it in some ways as a failure, which is like a very odd, uncommon point of view on that sort of outcome. Why would you describe it that way?