Elias Torres
Founder & CEO, Agency. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerhost@eliast ↗LinkedIn ↗agency.inc ↗
Elias Torres is a serial entrepreneur and engineer who co-founded Drift and served as VP of Engineering at HubSpot. He went on to found Agency, an AI platform for customer success teams, and hosts The American Dream podcast.
2shows
2appearances
50statements
8resolved
3supported
1contradicted
38%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Elias Torres said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Torres: Google AI products don't work and Notebook LM is already dead
“They invented this Transformers paper, and everything they put out doesn't work. Like Notebook LM, the great one, like it's already dead, right? The project. So it's like they're trying so hard, but they can't do it.”
Torres: Nobody is using Microsoft Copilot because the product doesn't work
“Copilot, everybody was like, they're just ahead making all the money first because people, the problem is people are, they just have so much hard time trusting someone, right? And so they're reaping the benefit of being early, But nobody's using the product, r…”
Torres: AI will displace B2B corporate workforces despite optimistic predictions
“That's bullshit, right? I just, it's just, you have had some guests here that I love and respect, but they're like, Oh yeah, we're gonna get larger, you know, in five years, and I'm like, what? I just saw something, you know, somebody posted on Twitter, it's l…”
Torres: Incumbent tech firms must cut headcount by 80% to survive
“If they do what Twitter did, if they reduce themselves to 20%, and build an amazing product, and are willing to break all their pricing models and revenues and change all of that, then they will survive.”
Torres: Paul Graham's 'do things that don't scale' rule is obsolete
“I think I want to challenge like Paul Graham says, do things that don't scale. I think that that's game over for that statement, right? I think now we only have to do things that scale.”
Elias Torres calls selling Drift the biggest failure of his life
“Drift is the biggest failure in my life.”
Torres claims Drift would be public without executive equity concessions
“I would have a public company right now if I, if it wasn't for like all those carrots that I gave and candy bars and trophies.”
Torres: Future software will eliminate human operators, functioning like driverless cars
“Software that has been built in the past 2030 years had the assumption, it was built kind of like we build cars. We build a car all around, and we build the entire environment, so a human goes and drives the car. Right? It requires an operator. The future is n…”
Torres: Cursor's Fast Revenue Growth Is Fragile Due to Low Switching Costs
“The cursors and all that stuff, like you can easily switch to like windsurf and you can switch to this and you can go back to copilot and like, so that revenue could disappear. This is a brand new phenomenon and we do not know how it plays out.”
Torres: 250 customer support reps at Drift did not solve scaling
“Cause at Drift I had 800 people, like 250 in the customer organization. That, that cannot happen again because it wasn't working, right? That, that number of people didn't necessarily solve the problem.”
Elias Torres: Code to build an LLM fits on one page
“The code fits on a, like, a page on the screen.”
Elias Torres manufactures adversity to raise gritty kids in wealth
“I just try to manufacture adversity. That's all I can for them.”
Torres: 400,000-person corporations cannot move fast despite Lou Gerstner's claims
“What I learned was that a four-hundred-thousand-person company just can't move as fast. Lou Gerstner was the CEO at the time and wrote a book called, like, Why Elephants Can Dance, right? And I don't think, I disagree with him. Elephants can't dance.”
Torres: Agency operates its 15-person team on a single daily meeting
“Right now at agency, I have no meetings with anybody, right? We're like 15 people. We have one meeting for the whole company, for the whole team. Show me what you did yesterday, show me what you're gonna do today. That's all we do in that meeting.”
Torres: CEOs err by delegating AI software implementation to middle management
“CEOs are making a big mistake right now. They're like, I talk to them and they're like, yes, this is what I want. I'm down. Elias, let's get agency in here right now. And then they pass me down to the next person and to the next person.”
Elias Torres avoids hiring introverted software engineers
“And so I don't, I tend to not hire like that many introvert engineers, right?”
Elias Torres: Founders waste time being frugal instead of focusing on customers
“I think people are wasting their time trying to be all frugal or this. I want to focus my time on the customers, right? And my team and my people.”
Torres: Founders spot bad hires within two weeks but ignore signals
“In reality, most people should know, like, within the first week or two, it's just, they just reject those signals.”
Torres: Overrode interview panels to make hiring decisions at Drift, HubSpot
“By the way that I ran interview at HubSpot and Adrift, everybody, I would help, I have a panel of people interviewing, But I would always interview myself. I will do the informal, I will do the formal, I bring them in, and then I do the closing. But I let them…”
Torres: Long tenure at a single company can be a hiring red flag
“If you stayed there for a long time, it's a red flag too.”
Torres: Having children at a younger age is optimal
“The best time to our children is when we're younger, unless we have unlimited resources, right?”
Torres convinced Klaviyo founder Andrew Bialecki to take VC funding
“I convinced him to take VC money.”
The other half of the tape: Elias Torres's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sarah Guo 3Harry Stebbings 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
No Priors 3
20VC 1
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Elias's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Agency | 1 | 38 | 75% 3/4 | full record on 20VC → |
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Agency | 1 | 12 | 0% 0/4 | full record on No Priors → |