Elias Torres

Torres calls selling Drift to Vista for $1.2BN in September 2021 “the biggest failure in my life” — not the price, but the failure to build something sustainable. 800 people (200 in customer success) killed product speed, and the soft culture is why there’s no public company: “I would have a public company right now if it wasn’t for all those carrots that I gave, and candy bars, and trophies.” The unspoken part of exits: “it’s sad to be nobody… you walk around in your own company and you don’t matter anymore.”

The incumbent scorecard is brutal: “the elephants are not dancing, they’re trying to dance.” Google “just dropped the ball” — invented the Transformers paper, yet “everything they put out doesn’t work; NotebookLM, the great one, it’s already dead.” Microsoft’s OpenAI bet was “genius” but on Copilot “nobody’s using the product.” ChatGPT is “the king” — yet still operator-software, “not the real solution, not the future.” He concedes distribution and data are the incumbents’ biggest edges but insists “speed is everything.”

The potential is 100-person companies doing billions in revenue — “smaller is better” was always true, “but because we couldn’t achieve billions in revenue without more people, we had no choice.” Agents could change that: “we’re just really trading people for compute.” Venture consequence he endorses: early rounds stay equity, growth financing becomes debt against predictable revenue, because far less equity gets burned on headcount.

Adoption will be slower than the hype because “humans are the biggest blocker” — CEOs tell him yes, then delegate the decision down layers that say “next quarter.” Hence his contrarian call: AI services companies will be bigger than AI technology providers within five years (Paul Graham trashed it; Torres personally made $2M in 6-7 months consulting for OpenAI’s customers). Timeline: 5-10 years, not 12-24 months — he offered to bet Harry against sudden 10% GDP growth: “we just discovered fire.”

Positions: the one stock he’d hold ten years is Nvidia (“I’m scared of the giants, they’re not going to last… we’re thirsty for compute”); his biggest public short is Salesforce; and he’s not selling Klaviyo, where he was first investor — “super underappreciated.” Counter-caveat on the new winners: Cursor-style revenue “could disappear — you can easily switch to Windsurf… this is a brand-new phenomenon.”

Hiring doctrine from the man Hiten Shah, Dharmesh Shah, and Pat Grady call the best recruiter they know: hire slow, fire fast, paid contract trials before offers, intensity as the filter (“open up your computer, I want to see your Git right now”). He hired five Northeastern grads in one day off their friends’ GitHubs and had them shipping code the same day. Titles are dying; comp moves to profit share, revenue share, and higher salaries.

The life thesis underneath: grit is manufactured by adversity — homeless at high-school graduation in Nicaragua, first tech on a stolen IBM in his dad’s garage. Have kids early (his first at 27, wife met at 17): “you can do both. It’s not going to be pretty, it’s going to be ugly” — but “I can die happy today.”

🔗 Original source & video: Elias Torres, Co-Founder and CEO @ Agency: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company