Why a $1.2B exit felt like his biggest failure, and the customer-obsession thesis behind Agency

I wanna change the way companies get built in the future. Go use Codex, go use Tudo Cloud, whatever to go build a product, a company, you think. But agents is the one's gonna help you grow the company and operate the company on a daily basis. What is your take on agents specifically?

As we just see the word everywhere. For as much as we talk about agents, to me, the agents don't really even exist yet. I mean there's coding agents, I know everybody's gonna jump at this, but agents that really are managing our lives is like are not there yet. Elias Torres, founder and CEO of Agency.

Coding agents are incredible. You know, we build our own background agent, like just like RAM. Ours is called intern. The majority of the code is being written on the cloud.

As we hear feedback from customers, we just send the intern to go build it and the code is ready. Integrations could be done in like a day. What do you think that is? Like if you think about as you build out agency, well, what is the go-to-market motion that supports?

Jack Dorsey was talking to Sequoia portfolio companies and he's like, sales is the last role that we'll eliminate because people want to buy from a human. You've called the $1.2 billion exit one of your biggest failures. The biggest failure.

Elias, welcome to GTM Now. Thank you for having me. This is great. Absolutely.

And we're gonna get into AI and agency, your current company, but I'd be remiss if we also didn't reflect upon some past chapters. And you know, Drift is one of those chapters. You've called Drift um the exit. You've called the $1.

2 billion exit one of your biggest failures, which I think to a lot of people are. The biggest failure, yes. Uh but that sounds crazy to a lot of people. And so I'd love to hear, you know, the why behind that, because there's always many more layers to the headlines that people see.

Yeah, I mean, I think that um, you know, you this is something that every entrepreneur dreams, you know, to to achieve, to accomplish, to get to it. And we really go on these incredible journeys, and then when we get to those things, the the few that get there um have another experience, right? Yeah. And so to me, it might have been different, maybe an IPO, right?

I would say different than than than the exit that I had, where you start realizing in life that that's the exit or the money is not everything. Yeah, it's like nothing changes, you're the same person day after. And when you reflect on it, you know, it's like what was the goal? What was the dream, right?

And so it we we like to say that we want to build an enduring company. Yeah, we wanna say that we change more people's lives, we want the impact to be larger. Um, but I think the thing that that affected me the most is you want to build something that that your customers are are are are are getting value from. And so to me, when when I'm no longer in control of the company, when I can know when the company is not sustainable, right, on its own, and it's gonna need funding, or when the private equity sells it to another company and then merges to another company, and then that company lets go of your people, and then that company shuts down the product, right?

Right. And so it's it's that's where I think it's the failure is coming from. And that we all make failure have failures, right? So it's not like it's bad to be a failure or to have a failure, but it is the biggest failure, right?

To let down the customers, to let down the team. It was good, it was good for everybody in in in many ways, but it there is a failure there, and I like to acknowledge it always and make sure that I learn from that. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and most important part, always learning from it.

And after that, that exit, you know, you took a little bit of time off. Curious how you spent that time, and then also why you jumped back into company building so quickly. I think that you know, I was um uh I'm trying to do the math. Uh I was uh I can't even do the math right now, but um, it's like 46 or something like that, right?

Yeah, and so um I never I'm an immigrant, I've worked all my life nonstop. Um I'm not gonna give you the like I worked at 13 type of thing, but I I I have worked nonstop, you know. And it was the first time. I think one of one great advice uh someone gave me was she said, um, slow down, right?

Take a deep breath and and adjust, learn to be no one, to be nobody, right? Because I think we're all chasing our ego, is always making us chase like a title, like I'm busy. Like if you ask everybody, like, yeah, I'm busy back to back. Just force you to peel back all the layers that you found in your identity.

Exactly, right? It's like it's like, what is my identity, right? What is or or just be comfortable with like, you know, I don't do anything, right? I don't I don't have uh I'm not CEO of this, or I'm not a VP of that, or like I'm not like managing a fund or whatnot, right?

It's like everybody wants to say right away, what do you do? Who are you? And and to be asked by people, who are you, what do you do? And I'm like, I'm doing nothing.

You know, it it was is a humbling experience. And so I was told to try that, you know, and and um and so I I I was saying that I had to detach from the company, bring closer to that, and then I have to spend time doing nothing and just accept that, and then figure out what the next step was. Right. So that was kind of like the the three-step journey that I took after after that decision, after selling the company, and that's when I took time off.

My problem is I like to be with people and try and experience it. So we were just doing spending time and then growing the relationships of people that I had that maybe I didn't have enough time for them, and got to do a lot of that and and did a lot of traveling and just go where people invite invited me and wanted to be part of that. As long as there's people and experiences, I love it. Yeah, what was one of your favorite experiences from that time?

Um, we did different things, you know. I went to um, you know, Japan, I went to Thailand, Singapore, Brazil, you know, Europe. I made a lot of friends in in in in Europe, in London, uh, that have been amazing relationships to me to this day, right? So it's it's um it's it was all of it is is a lot of fun.

I enjoy everything. Yeah. And what was the calling moment to actually go back to building? In that transition period, right?

I think uh I'm part of a uh of a fellowship and of people that are similar in age and have accomplished something, have had a moment like I had, and then we call it as an inflection point. Yeah, and that at that inflection point, you know, we're all in that journey, right? And so trying to figure out what to do. And I think that what happened was there's a book called From Strength to Strength, and that everybody gets stuck, you know.

Some people just want to work like in some CEO job and they don't want to let go, politicians, et cetera. And everybody's like, I just I I can't quit because then what am I gonna do? Right. And this book is talks about the strength of age and experience and how we need to transition into service, into mentorship, into coaching, into teaching.

And um, and so that's kind of where I was like, what is my transition? And I and and I and I found that that two things. One, um, as a Latino in this country, with the with the network and the access that I had, it would be wasteful for me to not, you know, try again to create an opportun uh a company and a place for other people to to be a role model, one, and then the other one is not everybody has a shot at I've been able to work at a great company. And so one of the one of the biggest blessings, the thing that I'm most grateful is when when people come up to me yesterday, I was at Saster, and um one of my old sales uh people from from our company from Drift before came to me, and he's like, just want to let you know that the time at Drift was one of the best times of my life, right?

And so when people say that to me, uh they say that to a performable, they say that a HubSpot, they say that at a drift, they they will say it at the agency, is like I had to create that place. Yeah, because there's not many great places to be at with people. But this time, I'm on that strength to strength book that I highly recommend of how am I more of a mentor of a coach than than I am when I at my prior companies where I was more like I wanted to do it, I wanted to take the credit, like I wanted to take charge.

Yeah. Now I'm like, it's the next generations, right? And so my job is just to facilitate the environment and create a place for them to do the best work of their lives. That's incredible, incredible.

And that kind of brings us to what you are building now, which is agency. Would you mind sharing just a little bit around agency itself for anyone unfamiliar? Yeah, I mean, I think the the biggest failure uh back to drift, right, was when you have thousands of customers, it's like you you you no longer can provide that what I used to do at the beginning, right? Right now, my customers they have my phone number, they can message me in Slack, I'm I'm showing up to the meetings.

My time is really 100% for customers mostly, right? And uh and they want to uh but then when you get you know many, many more and you get thousands, then you don't see them. And so this is the big uh conundrum that we have in companies and businesses. We like to grow, get customers, but we're not investing in in caring for them.

Uh, we we do not the budgets show that, right? You spend this much on acquisition and you spend this little in in retention. And so our customers were not being cared for, and that was part of the failure, right? And so agency is to address that.

How can we give the best experience possible to our customers, like if and treat them like if there were their only one? So agency is uh it's a provider of agents to help you create like a customer organization, right? Yeah, that it could be like the best organization that you ever wish you had, right? And so, how can we leverage AI to monitor, to care, to proactively to intervene at the right moment, at the right place, right?

For each of the customers in a very highly personalized way. Because even when we have humans with customers at that scale, nobody knows who you are, nobody remembers, nobody reads the profile, nobody reads the information, and so forth. So uh, I want to change the way companies get built in the future. I think people are like, they think they can buy code an app and a product, but who's gonna run that company?

Who's gonna operate that company? And so we are the the complement to that. Go use Codex, go use, you know, Claude, whatever, to um to go build a product, a company, you think, but agency is the one who's gonna help you grow the company and operate the company on a daily basis. Incredible.

And you mentioned right now your role in a way is focused on enabling the space for people to do their best work, and you know, you're building agency and you brought great people along for the journey. People are operating an agency that you've known for years, and also on the investor side. You know, Pat Grady backdrift. Now Pat Grady and Brian Halligan are behind agency for any founders looking to really cultivate um just great people to bring along, and let's hone in on the investor side with Pat and Brian.

You know, what would what advice would you give to any kind of founders looking to build those relationships? I've been very fortunate, right? I mean, I think fundraising for me has um never been that much of a struggle, right? In the sense uh I I know the journey of entrepreneurs, right?

They'll they'll talk to 40, they'll talk to 100 VCs and and never get funding. It's really hard. Uh I I've been fortunate. I I worked with David Canso before, and he had a he had a long-standing relationship with CRV, uh, with Ezar.

So Ezar, Pat, Brian, you know, there's uh those are my my uncles, so Brian and I are like close in age. I'm older than Pat. Ezar is older than me. Uh, but it's like they um Pat is the young one, just make sure he hears it gets on the record.

Yeah, yeah. We got the leaderboard. Yeah, the leaderboard just makes sure the thing is that I've been very fortunate, right? Because these are people that knew either David, Pat knew Brian at HubSpot, then that's how we got to know Pat.

It's about relationships, right? And it's about getting to know these people and the work that they do for us, for me, I've been fortunate because they they've been there for me before they even invested, right? Uh, and so those are very special kind of people. I I always like to test.

I have a lot of investors approach me and they're like, and I'm tough, like the because I'm just not used, I'm used to working with great investors that always been there for me. And they were long-term thinking, and they they they made me feel like they care about me. And then when the time was to come to invest, why would I say no to them? And so that but that's is it's different, but I know that that's not the same for everybody.

Uh, but what I do with new file new investors that want to approach me, I always say, Don't just give me your thesis and like your value and your deck, and like I'm like, like, I don't, I don't, I don't want to hear that. And I always say to people, show up consistently and do the work. You know, you say you're gonna introduce me to customers when you invest. Well, introduce me to customers now, right?

And so I just had um uh I know an old friend of mine that he had invested in one of the rounds in one of my companies, and one of my customers is using us, and he invested in that company. So he he caught wind of that, that they're really loving the product, and he's like, calls me up, he's like, Can I come? I'm I mean, I'm in Boston, I want you to deploy agency into 50 of my portfolio companies. Amazing, and that was amazing, right?

But I hadn't seen it. But that to me is like you he's not coming to say, Let's talk, are you fundraising? Yeah, he's like, I want to deploy you in 50% of 50 of my companies. If you do that, and then you want to say get priority into investing, um that's what I do.

So you I think uh that and I because I've gone through many different events, you know, selling companies, leaving companies, and uh and so forth. I've been with these investors at at at those like crucible moments, right? Where you get to see what where they stand when they see when they people say that they're like founder friendly, right? Or founder first.

And I, you know, I've been with Ezar to this situation multiple times. You know, we we sold performable to Hotspot, uh with Pat when we when we sold to Vista and personal moments, and and that's really the moment that really matters. VCs are busy, they they they don't they're not gonna be there, they're not gonna build a company with you. But it's at those moments, right, where you need them, do they show up?

And what side do they take? And they do you can you see that they put the firm second and they put you first? And I've been extremely lucky, right? Uh so that it's I would say that practically you I don't think anybody does.

Founders, if you're about to get a check, you don't you just get the terms and you sign it. Instead, you should be doing some reference checking. And you should be calling your like companies that fail, that those that those uh investors have been on the board. That's great advice.

Go call them, but nobody does, right? It's just effort, like I just want the money, I just want the money, I just don't want the money. But um when the when the stories go south, then you wonder why, right? Yeah, and there are there are investors that I I don't invest, uh, I wouldn't I don't even take calls with them, right?

Because I've seen what they've done as you know competitors to me in the past, how they approach, how they behave, how they act. And so like I don't I I I have my own references, and so but people yet take money from them, and I'm just like, wow, this are not people the character that I would work with. Yeah, it sounds like uh if you're to kind of distill that advice, it almost sounds like look for people that lead with value. Yeah, um, it's a long, it's a long journey, as you know, from drift and other experiences too.

And you mentioned David Cancel, you and David Cancel built together across multiple companies for over 20 years. What's it like now not building together? It's um yeah, it's a it's it's a little nostalgic. I mean, we we we we would spend we we have spent so much time working together, you know, like we we were so in sync, like we would start driving together out of each other's houses, and we had a long drive to the office, and then we'd just be on the phone the whole time, and then if we lived at the same time, the office, then we can talk on the way back, and that was our like sync time, and and I don't have that anymore.

But I think is um it's the journey, right? I think we're we're we're good, uh we're good friends. Um, I'm gonna see him in my birthday uh next next month. I was just with him.

Big milestone, dude. Yeah, big milestone. What are you doing to celebrate? Um, I'm going to Nicaragua, so I'm I'm going back home.

So it's uh it's chapter 50. I called the we the tagline is the the hashtag is homecoming. Homecoming. I hadn't been there in in 30 plus years, and and so get to share that with him and and many other friends.

Uh some of my investor friends coming. Beautiful. Uh, and um, I think with David is David was always um, I was always number two. One time we moved into one of our offices, and the the the security person, it was a Sunday, and we were moving stuff in, and she sees me and she's like, Hi, are you number two?

And I was like, Thank you. She's just met me. Uh, and so working with David was incredible. He was a mentor, he's a mentor uh to this day, and he taught me so much.

Um, but I think at some point, you know, after like you said, 15, 20 years, you want to um now you need to exercise what I've learned. Yeah. And back to that paying it forward, back to that like switching of the role. You know, I'm I'm working, my co-founder is Luke.

He uh I hired him when he was a sophomore. He was like 20 some 21, 22 years old, uh Northeastern adrift. Um, he's now 30. We worked together all this time, but now he's a CTO, I was a CTO, and I'm taking David's role and have the carrying out the weight and the responsibility of the company and the stress that that he used to carry, yeah, you know, alone most of the time.

And I get to mentor and coach Luke, and Luke is way better than me, uh, technically, and as a person and everything. And and so it's a joy to to to see what he does differently. And when I see him making the same mistakes that I that I made, I'm like, David said, you know, yeah, this is what David would say to me. Passing it down the wisdom chain.

The other day I was with David and we sent him like a like a um like a video recording to to Luke. Um because the mistakes that Luke make, I made too. So it's it's great to be able to do it. Uh I'm more graceful than David.

David was uh I have actually seen you guys on stage saying, never get on stage together. Yeah, yeah. I'm saying like I'm nicer, I think. Yeah, David would just beat me up hard.

But I I love it. I like I like tough love. I like tough love. I like it, I like it, bruv.

And now you're building agency with Luke. You've said that you want to build to over a billion dollars, just l less than a hundred employees, which I know to a lot of people sounds crazy. Tell us about that. Tell us about that bold claim.

Well, I mean, I think that if you don't, if you like constraint is is is the mother of um invention or something like that, necessity. There's a saying, right? It's like I grew up in in a communist regime when I when I was young and not a lot around. I don't know if you know about it.

Cuba still struggles, right? Uh in and with this, and and Cuba still all their cars are like 60, 70 years old. And they just keep them running, they work because they found ways to like make it work here in the United States. It's like if a car that is three years old stops working, it's easier to go buy a new one.

Yeah, people don't hit a hundred clicks and people. Exactly. It's it's so um so that doesn't teach us to be creative, innovative, or efficient. And I think that uh you're starting to see that now in companies think.

I mean, first of all, you see companies right now with uh two, three hundred people achieving four or five hundred million in revenue, right? So what I said a couple of years ago that sounded crazy is it's no longer sounding crazy, right? So I think it's it's more achievable now. I think that um one of the things that I'm doing is just being patient.

I think there's a lot of hype about what can be done, what AI does for you and the organization, but I don't think it has fully played out. And you know, we're around 25, maybe 30 people uh by this summer. And we are, I would say, like at a good local maximum right now in terms of organization and communication and clarity and alignment and vision that we're like really working through because the more people you have, the more complex it is, and the more inefficient you become.

And so you got large companies going from like 10,000 to 5,000, but the blood in there is just absolutely horrible, right? Anyone tells me that they're more efficient. I mean, you you you see what Elon did with X, right? Yeah, people didn't think it was gonna be possible, and it's still up and running, right?

I'm sure it was not easy, uh, but we we have to follow that same principle, right? And so I think that what we've seen just in the past year in coding agents alone, right? That's been a huge, huge progress that makes me step back and say, maybe 25 engineers is like more than you'll ever need. Maybe, maybe too much.

Right. And so we we definitely are along that trajectory of seeing that I I think it has to be within reach, but the hardest thing is finding the the right business model, right? That is gonna scale in the go to market motion to. Support that.

And what do you think that is? Like if you think about as you build out agency, well, what is the go-to-market motion that supports that? I think that um there's different, right? I think we you the the those those uh hyperscaler companies are companies like you know, let's say Vive Coding Platforms or or something like that, right?

That they are um self-serve, right? PLG. And they're consuming tokens and it's great revenue. We don't know about the cost margins and that, right?

But you know, we gotta keep thinking about self-sustainability and and and endurance. But I think that um so those are like it seems much easier, but you still have to decide to go that route. I'm more on like on a mission, right? I, you know, what one of the things that is becoming clearer to everybody, you have a dollar uh in in the software budgets, and then you have six dollars in labor, right?

So companies, you know, I had like let's say 200 people in the organization adrift to support the customer. Um, there's companies that have 200, 400, and then they're still only tapping and touching maybe like four or five percent of their customer base. And so there are larger budgets that you see companies like Sierra tapping into, right? Yeah.

Um, and then of saying like we will come and help you become more efficient, talk to more customers, serve more customers, retain more customers. And then the budgets that are available in that space are much larger, right? And so if you have a dedicated team to be able to support a product that will give that kind of return on investment in a company, the revenue from that could be substantial enough, right? To support that.

And the question is do we need FDEs? Do we not need FDEs? But it's still an enterprise sell, right? So there's still gonna be a motion where you have to build a relationship, you have to gain the trust.

An AI is not gonna be selling a million-dollar deal. No, no, not at all. Some people say, like Brian, I think we were at some event with Brian Halligan, and he's like, Oh, I forget, or or actually Jack said this. Jack Dorsey was talking to um to Sequoia portfolio companies, and he's like, Sales is the last role that we'll eliminate because people want to buy from a human.

And uh, you know, when when when we started agency, it was Brian's idea, actually. He was like, Would you start in the sales side? And I said, No, I want to start on the customer side. Yeah, and so some days I struggle with that, you know, because I feel like CEOs care less about customers, they care more about prospects.

And I'm like, Am I in the right spot? But then when I hear, you know, Jack saying sales is the last role that goes, it makes me wonder, yeah, I'm on the right place, right? In the sense of we're not gonna be able to automate that entirely. And just building a co-pilot is not going to be as financially successful.

But if I can autopilot and build the agents that manage customers, yeah, eventually there'll be a flip and people will understand that the investment there is better. So I'm I'm post sales and and that's where I wanna wanna spend. That's my mission, right? Yeah.

And what does that look like for somebody? Let's say I'm a customer. What does that interaction look like? What changes from what I'm used to?

Well, it depends, right? It's as I think um of a vendor, right? That we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, let's say, right? A month.

Okay. And then we're like, um we have a Slack channel, we have an account manager or something, you know, and they're like, then all of a sudden you get a new message and it says, Hey, I'm now uh, you know, uh Mikey, I'm your new AM. Right. And it's like, here's my calendar, let's schedule a time to meet.

Yeah. And let me see what you need. And I'm just like, what? What on earth is like I do not want to go into this meeting.

Uh and what what is it that I would have wanted, right? I would have wanted somebody to show up and say, Mikey, uh, here are the things that I see you have asked in the past. These are your workloads, this is what you're using, this is the features, this is the access that you needed. I want to increase X, Y, C, and I know you.

I will continue working on those for you. I have all the context. I will follow up with you. And if you want to have any time to you know catch up with me, like 15 minutes if you have any questions, I'm here, available for you, right?

Right. That would have been a better transition, right? Definitely. Um, and then then the the other day we called and we had to do something, and they said, No, you have to submit a form online.

You can't just, I'm in Slack with them. They just responded. It's like, no, you have to submit a form somewhere else. And I'm like, given what I'm paying, like, can you just like fill out the form for me?

Yeah. I go try to fill out the form, the form is broken. And I'm like, it doesn't work. It's like, okay, I'll do it for you.

It's like, why go through that? So that's an example of an experience when you're supposed to have this white glove VIP, and and that's really how how we treat in the customers. Uh, and the other side is the PLG, you know. So you're you're you're there and and you're trying to use this product, and there's no 800 number, there's no chat, there's nothing that you can call because they can't staff that right.

And then you're like, okay, um you're gonna get maybe a few sequenced emails when when you first start, but they're not personalized and not they have nothing to you know for you, and just the same static email that everybody gets, and then you never hear from them again, right? And so what if when you're trying to use the product, you get a message, you get a chat about that explains to you, and you're stuck and it's not working, and it would explain it to you. What if you get an offer?

What if you get a personalized message about this is your business, this is how you're using your product, and you could benefit if you use something else? Like that's the opportunity. But I think you asked the right question, right? One is a capability.

Can we automate the things that humans do? But the most important question is what is the experience that the customer wants? Right? Not everybody wants an email, not everybody wants a phone call, right?

Right. Or too many or not, or some people want more, right? And so, but that's what I believe this this mission is like never-ending. How to best understand every single one of your customers in a cost-efficient way that makes your business endurable, right?

Incredible. Well, you really turned, I mean, what you call the biggest failure into you know, your your biggest um, you know, future legacy that you're creating and building, which is very cool. You don't like the word legacy, not just the mission, right? Yeah, yeah.

It's like yeah, a mission. Who cares about legacy? Like I don't know. We we'll be forgotten in like 10 years.

I'm closer to death, you know. So it's like 10, 20 years later, very few people uh will remember us. A quick pause. Most teams are either paying for tools they've outgrown or making decisions with no real data behind them.

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What changes for people as they think about restructuring the organization? Because a lot of people now are trying to achieve larger revenue milestones with fewer headcount and prioritizing the customer accordingly. Like what management principles need to change? How are people supposed to restructure their organization around that too?

Yeah, I mean, I think um our organization, there's smarter big-time CEOs than bigger, bigger time CEOs than me. I'm just I'm a first-time CEO, I'm a new, I'm an amateur uh as a CEO. I would say that I'm a machine gear for action, right? Okay.

I'm I'm I'm action-packed, right? To me, it's about momentum, making decisions quickly, taking action. And I do it all around the customer. So I'm not really a I'm very familiar with you know, with structures and companies and so forth, but I'm I'm not I'm anti them.

I just they don't make any sense. To me, it's always the answer. Exactly. I'm just telling you what I naturally do.

I'm good at the smaller company part of it, right? Yeah. When we had 600 people, I just to me, all that was just bullshit, you know, and and so here at agency, the majority are engineers. It's like 80-90% of the company is engineers, and um everybody uh serves the customer.

So like everybody responds to the customers, everybody meets with the customer, everybody fixes the problem directly. There is no we're using agency ourselves to make sure that the customers don't fall behind. So agency will tell us what customer has not been responded to, what are we owing to a customer, what do we need? And it will manage and tell us what to do, right?

And so if you build that part of the code, AI knows what the call has, the code who built it, who owns it, who's been supporting things like that in the past, and we'll add them in Slack and get them to answer the question. So we're really kind of self-organized, like you know, one of my biggest things is high agency people, right? I just hate when people don't take action. Yeah.

When people don't have an initiative to solve a problem on their own. Or they're like afraid, and you know, and so that's when I said I want to create an environment where people do their best work, is because they act like I would do. I just I see a problem, I go solve it, right? And so the team is all around that.

Um, people, all the engineers are involved with security. Every all the engineers are involved with customers, all the engineers are involved with cost. Uh the sales, uh, we we have a small sales organization. These are the best sellers I ever worked with, right?

Because they're customer focused. They help on board the customers that they sold. Their prospect, they know them, they help them along, and they're available to respond support and development and onboarding and training and enablement, right? Because we want to build organizations that we're at their core of their systems when it comes to managing customers.

So it's like everybody is involved with everything, and we don't we don't have titles. I know that that's the new hot thing to say, but it's like we we don't because it's like, what is it? You know, we're just supporting the customer. Do you think you'll introduce titles at any point?

I hope not. That's part of the constraint of the 100, you know. Yeah, I think that um you know, when when Drift was 100, it was life was much simpler. And then after that, I remember having to have meetings about levels and about like titles and reporting.

And I had like, oh, we had so many product managers, and we're like, and then I had like my VP of products, like we need to have levels because they're directors that grew PMs and this and that. And I'm like, I don't care about this stuff. Like, yeah, I just care about people that actually ship product, right? And help.

And so with the collapse, and we we don't have designers, we do not have product managers. Uh just like um a few of us, you know, Luke, me, others, we're just like taking a little bit of uh that sharing the load on product management. But everybody has to fight for getting the clarity and alignment of what we're doing for the customer. So we I wouldn't say we have oh, here's the framework, and here's I'm gonna put my article in X of how to do this.

I'm just telling you how we're doing it right now, and it's very, very fluid. Everybody hands-on, nobody can say I'm that's not my job. If you look at the recent companies that have just like gone on to have tremendous growth like Legor and other companies, like the common thread between them is the feedback loop between customers and like proximity to the customer is like a big key part of their journey. So it'll be interesting to see um how people structure and change just as you are to be closer to the customer.

Yeah. I mean, I think the the some of these companies, what they've done that is tremendous, is distribution. Yes. I I think the distribution is key.

Um and that's something that I'm I'm trying to pay close attention because that's that's the thing the hardest part, like to get the attention or the removing the friction and the adoption for people to do it. So I don't have to create necessarily a huge organization with go to market to be like, you know, uh I the the the valley is pushing FDs so hard right now on every but that's just gonna create a huge organizational bloat. And that's something that I'm you know wrestling with, right?

If we start selling higher contracts and we just say, here's an FDE, here's an FDE, an FDE for you, an FDE for you, everybody gets an FDE. Uh that's gonna create a much more complex organization. Yes. And and and I don't believe the FDEs are happy, you know, doing this job.

What I hear is the complaints. If you've been assigned an FDE for two years at this company, what's your progress going to be like? Yeah, you're gonna get just like a better company next time, like what what what what is and so I don't think that that creates the type of organization and people that I want. And uh there I said it, you know, and I don't want to have to create like levels of FDEs and management of FDEs and empire building, right?

Uh, our team, everybody supports all the customers. So my company, you don't get one FDE, you get all of us. We all are forward deployed engineers. I love it.

And so I'm trying to fight that and trying to build a product and trying to get a distribution uh flywheel that will scale, but it's uh, you know, I don't have 400 million revenue, right? So but I'm I'm I'm I'm a missionary right now. I want to solve this customer problem because I don't want to just sell a tool that we charge lots of money, spend a lot of tokens. I want to send something that changes the way their business manages their customers and the customers love it.

That is an incredible mission. Yeah. And you mentioned one of the hardest parts now is building distribution. How do you think companies will successfully build distribution?

Whether it's how you're thinking about building distribution at agency or just in this AI era, how can people build distribution better? I think that um there's brute force in it, right? I just I just think that um, you know, you can raise a lot of money, you know, pay a lot of ads everywhere, you know, in the valley, you know, have planes fly over conferences, have marching bands, you know, you can do a lot of stuff. You can hire fancy art actors and and create quick cool videos and uh spend a lot of money on influencers.

So there's that those set of tactics, which by the way, I think part of it is is is uh my my weakness, right? Um I'm a relationship, I like I want to make a customer happy. Yeah. And so I'm more old-fashioned and saying, like, what I what I see is like if I win a customer, which is I'm I'm learning, right?

We're building the product that does it. And then that customer tells their investor, and that investor says, I have 50 companies, right? I'm still a more of a word of mouth and a reputation, and that's what I'm I'm teaching the team to earn. But I want to solve something that is of high value.

You know, you don't want to build another vitamin, you know, it's something that okay, I vive coded something once, and then I'm gonna, I don't need it again, or like I go switch to the next thing that gives me free credits. I want something that people go like, I want to go to that company, I want to go to agency because they're solved it for them and uh for this customer, for this other you know, company. I want them to solve it for me and and I want to be a partner to them, and then allows me to you know build larger relationships, larger value, uh, larger benefit.

So I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm still doing it old school, right? Yeah. I love it. I love it.

And you know, one of the things of how you're building is the people. Everybody's super involved with the customer. And if you look at kind of your track record of working with great people, like we've talked about it, it is fantastic. You know, Andrew went on to build Clavio, now a public company, and Chris built HubSpot CRM, and Whitney is HubSpot CTO.

Like you've got just this beautiful kind of orbit of people that you've worked with. How do you think about hiring? I think that um I would say that that's the greatest pleasure of my career from a legacy perspective, is really um getting that feedback that these people really that was their best time so far, career-wise. This guy is in Australia.

He says, I'm by the way, I'm married, uh, we have my first kid. I think that that's my my personal, you know, selfish satisfaction to know that I made an impact in someone's life, right? I would say role modelship is is really the key. Brian Halligan is a role model to me.

You know, I I went to work with him, I I I helped him with David to take up spot public. But seeing him make uh a unit build a unicorn, right, is what inspired me to be like, oh, I can do that too. Like it doesn't look that it was that hard. So he demystifies, right?

Because I think a lot of people we block our our minds to be like, can we do something, right? And yeah, and so it's like so to me, being with people that have accomplished great things is very inspiring. And the closer you work to them, the more you realize it's possible, and then they're just like normal. They're just a normal human being, you know.

I just give you a lot of people. Yeah, and then we're not that different. We had two legs, two arms, you know, most of us. And so we're like, we so it's okay, right?

And so we we um so Brian inspired me to go do that. Um, you know, uh to do that with Drift. Um, performable Andrew was inspired by what he saw from us and and went and says, I'm gonna build it, I'm gonna make it better, right? And and he did, right?

And so he's it's uh to this day we have such a great relationship. But uh, I was just having drinks with him yesterday. That's awesome. We we we got to see each other in in the West Coast and sometimes don't have time in the East Coast.

And so I think that um I just believe everybody has so much potential. But what I do is I I don't look for credentials. I know people say that, but I don't. If you look at if you look at the roster of the people that I know, um there are almost no credentials.

You know, the the highest credentials probably might be like Northeastern, you know. But is Northeastern attracts people that are humble, they have a whole different work ethic and discipline. Uh their their values, you know, their attitude, their hunger, um is is different than than someone that is just trying to impress me or with credentials or how many rung up the ladders or what clubs they grew up in, and blah blah blah. Who's that network?

Who do they know? I give two shits about all that stuff, you know. Yeah, and so the all the people, I mean you mentioned some of them, but I the amount of people that that are still making a huge impact uh at HubSpot. I had the people that I hired, and they like I run into people like, oh, I was in Albany and I was working for the government of New York and as an engineer in some warehouse.

Yeah. And now they're running engineering at HubSpot, you know. And so I think that I see, do I see it? Or everybody has this potential.

But it's the environment that you create that inspires them to go on and do great things. So if you if you combine the values and the attitude with the environment, that's where you have great successful people come out of that, right? And so I've been fortunate to be, you know, having Brian and and David and others, right? And and the investors and Pat that allow me to create this environment that I can attract people that I can see great values, that they're gonna go and do amazing things, right?

The same as the same as for Luke, you know. Yes, very cool. You see that pattern across all different areas of your life. So that's very beautiful.

And I want to ask you a couple kind of last questions here. Agents. Hard pivot. Hard pivot.

But you know, you talked about building an enduring company, and there's a lot of companies and agents coming up. What is your take on agents specifically? As we just see the word everywhere. I I have positives and negatives, or maybe status.

I don't know. I think agents are the as an engineer, right? Like when I first graduated in you know, a long time ago, you know, at the early days of the internet, uh writing a program that automated something. Like I remember being like first college, first job out of out of college, and and I always would be like, I don't know, I always watch people that were not using computers or would and or they're like, look, I copy from this spreadsheet into this email, and I hit you know how many jobs are still like that, right?

You know, we just we we're we're working with a large manufacturing company that people receive emails, they Go to their own website, they type in the things from the email, and then they hit a button, they download the PDF, and they attach it into the email and they send it. Oh my god. It's like 200 people that do this, right? Yeah.

And so this is to this day. So I saw that 30 years ago, uh, 40, I don't know. And it's like, and I would be like, I can write a program that does that. Right.

And so that was like to me, like the most powerful thing in the world that I could write a program that did grab that value from here, find it with regular expressions. Agents is the ultimate materialization of programming. Right. It's now we have an agent that can write code, that can read the inputs, that can write itself, and that can run itself to accomplish the task.

And so it's extremely fascinating, right? Of what the potential that we have in the world. Yet we're still such in such a sad state of the world when it comes to agents. For as much as we talk about agents, to me, agents don't really even exist yet.

You know, I mean, there's coding agents. I know everybody's gonna jump at this, but agents that really are managing our lives, it's like uh are not there yet. Maybe the biggest example is open claw, you know. And that's I would say it's gone far.

Like there's a lot of people that I never expected said that they're running an open claw, but it's still just basically a little reminder, you know, it stores reminders. And you know, I love how people are like so in love with their agents, and they're like, look, it does this. You know, I was talking to a founder, and they're like, Oh, it's my product manager, it manages uh all my product management. And I'm like, show me this agent, and you know, which we're still prompting and asking questions.

That's not an agent, right? To me, an agent is when you have offloaded all your worries for that workflow, for that role at a company, and he can do it continually at a high rate of success with self-improvement, optimization, right, and reporting and ability for me to interact with it, right? And so what I want, right, is for a company to say, I hire my renewal specialist from agency, and you know, the renewal specialist comes in into your company, watches how you had done the renewal process with your existing customers, can read your wiki, can read the emails, can read the contracts in Salesforce, um, gets the understanding of the process and says, Okay, I'll start taking on all the new renewals, does it, and it's improving its rate, it reports it, it says, Look, I'm I'm renewing at this percentage.

And what else do you need, right? And uh, here's the feedback, this is where the pushback, this is where we need to change pricing. That's an age. Yeah, that's the future, right?

And so, how do we create these agents that humans trust that are delivering the right experience to our customer, and that they are efficient and to and caught and not too costly to run is the future that we're headed. But I I think we're nowhere near that, right? I mean, it could accelerate, but I mean it's gonna for every business to have agents that are running your customer organization like that in the world, we're far. We're just getting started.

I mean, like 0.0001 of businesses might be doing something near like that. And so that's what's really exciting about agency, right? And the vision, it's like uh a lot of people get caught up on like this company is this, AJI is coming and so forth, and like humans, we we're the biggest uh bottleneck to adoption of AI.

Um, but technically speaking, we we no one has a clue how to build that yet. And humans are the biggest bottleneck. How do we get out of the way? I think that um we we need to, as businesses, uh I'm trying to find the areas where I think that the humans are very reluctant to change because we're afraid of our jobs, and so we we don't want to change.

And whenever so if the way I kind of present it sometimes is like as a human, let's say that you can only do 10 things for each customer and that's your job because physically you're not it's not you're not capable that we don't we 24 hours, right? Yeah, and so but what if we wanted to do another 90 things that we just never had a chance to do for the customer? So uh I'm positioning that to our customers and say, like, what are the other 90 things that you wish you could do that you cannot do and work on those so we don't have to clash and let and let those those those humans continue doing what they're doing.

That's one approach, right? The other approach that we talk about, but I this is where the the bottleneck comes in, is where like, why don't we tell the human like don't do this nine things because they're all administrative, yeah, and like you know, just mind-numbing, and you get to do another nine things with a customer from you know that that would spend more time and be more strategic and you can learn more, and it could be more rewarding for yourself and your career, but but there's a there's still a lot of hesitation there, right?

And there's a lot of um lack of trust up and down the the hierarchy in the company to try and something with the customer. People are afraid, like then. And so like I like to attract and hire people that are not afraid. And that's why you are now running your own organization where you don't have to be in an organization where there is fear, you can can operate as you wish.

What are some of the administrative things that you personally have kind of offloaded to AI or empowered AI to run that other people are still a little bit scared to do? Um, like I said, agents don't exist. You know, I I think that how we offloaded, I think to us, I'm still leveraging uh to be fair, a lot of humans, right? I I the the the organizations my my life is all revolves around customer.

And so I administrated, I do very little. I have you know, I have people that help me on the finances. That's one of the benefits of exits, you know, and um and some of the calendar and in the travel. And I'm I'm just highly disorganized.

So definitely don't have to people organize a lot for me, and I do it in the lowest friction possible. But really, my biggest leverage is definitely agency, right? Like we we don't even have a CRM, like agency is our entire system of record for the company, right? All the communications, all the tasks, all the project, all the community, all the all the back and forth and managing the processes is all done in agency.

And so it's um is our biggest leverage uh from an AGNTEC fashion of how we run the company. And like everybody in the company that has worked before the company says, how could we possibly uh work out with work without agency anymore? Uh and so I think that that's that's the important thing. Like anything that has to do with customer, what do I need to do, who we're missing, what they're saying.

Uh, we just use our own system um to do that. And and and that's fascinating. All the other stuff I think is still very gimmicky. Um and then obviously coding, coding agents are incredible.

You know, we build our own background agent, like just like ramp, like it's called Inspect. Ours is called intern. And the majority of the code is being written on the cloud as we are as we hear feedback from customers. Um, we just send the intern to go build it.

And the code is ready. Integrations could be done in like a day. Yeah, it's incredible what what what the coding is. And so now that's why the whole team can be like a forward deployer engineering team, because we can just spend more time with the customers as a whole.

What an exciting time to have come up and seen engineering through so many different capacities and scopes, and now to have this intern being able to do that. Super cool. My mentors were like writing uh the C language, you know, before it's like I wasn't quite in that group. They're like older or in, but yes, I was at the early stages of the internet and and programming, and now this is uh it's so so much fun.

Well, I'm so excited for you and agency to continue building, Elias. Thank you for joining. Where can people find you if they want to follow along with agency and yourself? I would say um I'm more of a LinkedIn guy, you know.

I guess uh that's where I have more of my audience. I'm on X, but um go to agency.inc, you know, with that and um get in touch with us. I mean, I think we'd love to if you bring your customer problems to us, we would love to talk.

Beautiful. At least, thank you. Thank you for having me.