No PriorsNo Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Sarah Guo and Elias Torres on immigrant founder reimagines customer success and software in AI era.
In this episode of No Priors, featuring Sarah Guo and Elias Torres, No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres explores immigrant founder reimagines customer success and software in AI era Elias Torres, repeat founder and former HubSpot engineering leader, discusses his journey from poor Nicaraguan immigrant and math-competition kid to building multiple billion‑dollar companies. He explains why selling Drift for over $1B felt like a failure relative to his ambition to build a $30B public company, and how that led to a period of burnout, kite-surfing, and then renewed energy sparked by ChatGPT. That energy turned into consulting for OpenAI customers and ultimately founding Agency, a company focused on transforming how businesses support and empower customers using AI agents instead of bloated customer success orgs. Throughout, he argues that most enterprise software is “enslaving” busywork, predicts a shift to invisible, proactive AI-driven systems, and outlines how he’s building a lean, high‑leverage, billion‑revenue company with only 100 world‑class people.
Immigrant founder reimagines customer success and software in AI era
Elias Torres, repeat founder and former HubSpot engineering leader, discusses his journey from poor Nicaraguan immigrant and math-competition kid to building multiple billion‑dollar companies. He explains why selling Drift for over $1B felt like a failure relative to his ambition to build a $30B public company, and how that led to a period of burnout, kite-surfing, and then renewed energy sparked by ChatGPT. That energy turned into consulting for OpenAI customers and ultimately founding Agency, a company focused on transforming how businesses support and empower customers using AI agents instead of bloated customer success orgs. Throughout, he argues that most enterprise software is “enslaving” busywork, predicts a shift to invisible, proactive AI-driven systems, and outlines how he’s building a lean, high‑leverage, billion‑revenue company with only 100 world‑class people.
Key Takeaways
Ambition resets with exposure; big outcomes can still feel like failure.
Torres viewed selling Drift for $1B as emotionally anticlimactic because his benchmark had shifted to building a $30B public company, illustrating how success is relative to evolving personal goals.
AI can reignite careers and create entirely new company theses.
His “ChatGPT moment” in late 2022 led him from semi‑retirement and burnout into hands‑on OpenAI consulting and, subsequently, founding Agency around AI-driven customer solutions.
Customer success is really about owning the full customer relationship.
Torres argues the label “CS” is misleading; the real challenge is how companies serve customers like high‑touch personal relationships, but at the scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of accounts.
Future software teams will be tiny, elite, and relentlessly scalable.
His target is $1B in revenue with ~100 people by refusing to hire for work that doesn’t scale, using AI instead of adding layers of staff, and only bringing in people who prove world‑class execution via trial contracts.
Change management, not just LLM capability, is the hardest problem.
Getting enterprises to trust AI outputs for high‑stakes customer communication, and to gradually migrate away from chaotic legacy processes, is a deeper challenge than simply wiring an LLM into existing tools.
Most enterprise software creates administrative slavery rather than value.
He criticizes systems like CRM as busywork machines where armies of people feed data into databases that rarely produce tangible, proactive value—arguing founders should question if they even need such tools.
The next generation of software will be proactive, invisible, and personalized.
Torres envisions tools that quietly handle logistics and outreach (e. ...
Notable Quotes
“Our software is shit. Everything is ridiculous.”
— Elias Torres
“At Agency, there’s only gonna be one email address: elias@agency.inc.”
— Elias Torres
“The old wrappers of databases are going to be dead.”
— Elias Torres
“I lost the dream of building a $30 billion company or taking a company public.”
— Elias Torres
“Do not do things that don’t scale. I already know that they will work for a year and then they’re gonna break.”
— Elias Torres
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can established SaaS companies practically transition from legacy CRM workflows to the proactive, AI-native customer experiences Torres describes without disrupting existing revenue?
Elias Torres, repeat founder and former HubSpot engineering leader, discusses his journey from poor Nicaraguan immigrant and math-competition kid to building multiple billion‑dollar companies. ...
What specific skills and behaviors distinguish the kind of ‘top 100’ employees Elias wants at Agency from strong but more conventional startup hires?
How should founders decide which traditional software systems (like Salesforce or project management tools) they should abandon versus augment with AI?
What governance or safety mechanisms are needed before enterprises can trust AI agents to autonomously email and manage million‑dollar customer relationships?
If most modern software is “enslaving,” what are the concrete design principles for building tools that make users feel genuinely wealthier in time and attention?
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
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