Torres: Drift reached $100M revenue before $1B cash sale
Elias Torres · No Priors Ep. 94 | With CEO and Founder of Agency Elias Torres · Dec 19, 2024 · at 5:36
Elias Torres, co-founder of Drift and founder of Agency, reflects on selling Drift to Vista Equity Partners despite feeling it fell short of an IPO.
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“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 taking a company public, right?”
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More from Elias Torres
Torres: Paul Graham's 'do things that don't scale' rule is obsolete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.”
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.”
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…”
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?”
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…”