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Elias Torres

Founder & CEO, Agency · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

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.

12statements → 6claims → 4claims resolved → 0%fully supported → 4.08/5average certainty → 2.42/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 3said about them ↓

0 supported 3 partly supported 1 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 5 assertions · 3 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Elias argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Torres built the first AI SDR at Drift in 2019
“At Drift, I built in 2019 the first AISDR”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 10:54 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Elias Torres on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Elias Torres said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Torres: Paul Graham's 'do things that don't scale' rule is obsolete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 Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 17:01 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 15:28 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Insight
Torres: Startups know how to build and sell, but fail at customer success
“Startups. We know how to like build products. I mean, we know how to raise money, hire people, build products. We know how to sell it. Sometimes we know how to market them, but I don't believe we know how to take care of our customers, especially in the B to B…”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 9:57 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Assertion Contradicted
Torres built the first AI SDR at Drift in 2019
“At Drift, I built in 2019 the first AISDR”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 10:54 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Disclosure
Torres: Agency will only have one public email address
“At agency, there's only going to be one email address. It's aliasatagency.inc. Everyone will email. I will always like take care of all the customers, right?”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 15:14 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Disclosure
Torres: No one joins Agency without completing a contractor trial period
“No one joins agency until they have work for me as a contractor. I'm going to put you to work and I am going to be real exactly how I am with everybody in the company today. And if you don't deliver at a level that is World-class in that one or two week timefr…”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 19:57 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Insight
Torres: Customer success reps scrutinize LLM emails far more than their own
“To trust the output of an LLM to send an email to a million dollar customer. It's like, you know, when you present that to a CSM, they're like looking at it and they're like, they're questioning every word. You have no idea. They're questioning every word in t…”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 22:06 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Torres: Database wrapper software will die without rapid adaptation
“I'm talking at the solution level, the old wrappers of databases are going to be dead. Like there's just no way they survive. Unless they adapt quickly.”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 26:56 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Assertion Partly supported
Torres: Drift reached $100M revenue before $1B cash sale
“It took a long time for all those things to clear up what it meant to sell for a billion in cash, right? A company that we grew to a hundred million in revenue, eight years of hard work, but I lost the dream of building a thirty billion dollar company or takin…”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 5:36 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Disclosure
Torres consulted for OpenAI on LLM apps for NBA and Ticketmaster
“And so I did consulting for them and I started from the bottom, right? People were like, who are you? I was doing some support tickets for them et cetera, explanations. But then I started getting contracts like the NBA, you know, ticket master. I'm in Dubai ta…”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 8:56 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Assertion Partly supported
Torres: HubSpot Had $30M Revenue and 200 Employees at Performable Acquisition
“When Brian Halligan came to me and bought my company, Performable, so he's like, our goal is to take it public in the next year or two. I had no clue what taking a company public meant. I mean, we had thirty million in revenue, 200 employees when he said those…”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 3:33 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres
Assertion Partly supported
Torres: HubSpot Scaled from $30M to $130M Revenue in Three Years
“We go public, a billion dollar company, three years, everything was great. We went from 30 to a hundred and thirty million.”
Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 ▶ 4:01 No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres

The other half of the tape: Elias Torres's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode on No Priors. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sarah Guo 3

Every mention by year

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2023 3 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres Dec 19, 2024 21m
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