No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Sarah Guo (host), Elias Torres (guest)
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
The next generation of software will be proactive, invisible, and personalized.
Torres envisions tools that quietly handle logistics and outreach (e. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What specific skills and behaviors distinguish the kind of ‘top 100’ employees Elias wants at Agency from strong but more conventional startup hires?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should founders decide which traditional software systems (like Salesforce or project management tools) they should abandon versus augment with AI?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What governance or safety mechanisms are needed before enterprises can trust AI agents to autonomously email and manage million‑dollar customer relationships?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
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?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
(instrumental music) 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 customer 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.
Ah, it's a pleasure. It's been a- a dream of mine to be here with you.
You're doing company number five. Can you just talk a little bit about who you are, uh, getting to this place?
Yeah, absolutely. Uh, the- the journey, um, 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, you know, reading the printouts, to founder number five, three times with Sequoia, you know, and out- 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- and so here I am, I'm in Boston. Uh, 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.
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. Uh-
Yeah. (laughs)
... Elias, you- you were one of the math competition kids.
I was a math competition. I wish I would be like- like an Andrezj or something like that, right? (laughs) But- but, um, 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. Uh, it- 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 i- is applicable. And when I came to- to the United States, I'm in a low income town in- in Tampa, Florida, low income school, public school, and somehow, again, I don't speak English, but somehow, the math teacher says, "Do you wanna be in math competitions, Mu Alpha Theta?" And I'm like, "Sure, I'll join the- the nerd club." And I'm like, just had a blast there. I did have a lot of trouble with the word problems, uh, but I was able to do well in the other ones.
I wanna talk a little bit about the last two journeys, um, because-
Yeah.
Install uListen to search the full transcript and get AI-powered insights
Get Full TranscriptGet more from every podcast
AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and fact-checking. Free forever.
Add to Chrome