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Elias Torres got his start in tech using a stolen IBM computer

Elias Torres · Elias Torres, Co-Founder and CEO @ Agency: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 21, 2025 · at 8:15

Elias Torres is the Co-Founder and CEO of Agency and former Co-Founder of Drift. He describes how he first encountered technology after moving to Los Angeles to avoid the Sandinista military draft in Nicaragua.

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“He bought, like, a stolen computer. Like, people came and sold him, you know, and so I, he put it in the garage, and he said, go play with it. And so that's, it's like an IBM computer, like, you know, in the eighties, and I would be typing my homework in this printer in WordPerfect and using Lotus one, two, three. That was the beginning. I think that planted the seed that I was just attracted to this device and what it was able to do.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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