Elias Torres argues that revenue is not the ultimate validator of a product. He has seen founders with $50 million in revenue who are "delusional" that their product truly works or is sticky. This time, he is prioritizing user obsession and product stickiness over early monetization to avoid this trap.
At HubSpot, Elias Torres built an exceptional team, hiring future founders of companies like Klaviyo. His strategy was to ignore credentials and instead screen for hunger, grit, and intelligence through conversation. He believes giving people with non-traditional backgrounds a shot is key to finding outliers.
Customers are so accustomed to the perfect accuracy of deterministic, pre-AI software that they reject AI solutions if they aren't 100% flawless. They would rather do the entire task manually than accept an AI assistant that is 90% correct, a mindset that serial entrepreneur Elias Torres finds dangerous for businesses.
A retired VC advised serial entrepreneur Elias Torres to "forget everything you've ever learned." Pattern recognition and past experience can become a trap for successful founders, especially during a technological shift like AI. The challenge is to let go of old playbooks and charge into the future with a fresh perspective.
As Drift grew to thousands of customers and hundreds of employees, Elias Torres found his time consumed by managing people, not talking to customers. He intimately felt the pain of losing that direct connection, realizing that by the time a CSM flags a churn risk, it's often too late. This pain directly inspired his next company.
Despite Drift's massive success, co-founder Elias Torres reflects that the product was ultimately "shallow." It excelled at the first customer connection (lead capture) but failed to carry that context through the entire customer journey. This created a fragmented experience and limited its depth, a key learning for his new company, Agency.
Elias Torres argues that the current AI paradigm, which focuses on tools that assist humans (e.g., summarizers, drafters), is fundamentally limited. He believes true value is unlocked when you can instruct an AI to perform a task *infinitely* on its own, without requiring a human to type into a chat box for every action.