20VC: Selling Drift for $1.2BN is the Biggest Failure: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company | Why Incumbents Are Slower & Worse Than Ever | Why the Most Valuable Companies in a World of AI Will Not Have More Than 100 People with Elias Torres
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2025
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Elias Torres is the Co-Founder and CEO of Agency, the AI agent for customer success teams. Prior to Agency, Elias was the Co-Founder of Drift, a company he sold to Vista for $1.2BN Before that he started Performable, which he sold to Hubspot.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
03:50 Do Rich Founders Make Better Founders: How Backgrounds Shape You
06:23 Speed: Why are Incumbents Slower than Ever
10:00 Quality: Why are Incumbents Worse than Ever
25:34 Why Was Selling Drift For $1.2BN a Massive Failure
33:30 How Did a Cushy Culture Kill Drift
37:01 What They Never Tell You About Selling for $1.2BN
41:08 How to Hire F******* Rockstars
46:52 The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Hiring
54:52 Everything You Think You Know About Working Parents is Wrong
01:02:00 Quickfire
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Is selling a company what we are told it is? |
| 0:03.4 | Shift is the biggest failure in my life. |
| 0:05.2 | Like, I wanted to build something great. |
| 0:06.5 | I wanted to build something sustainable. |
| 0:08.1 | To walk around in your own company and you don't matter anymore. |
| 0:11.0 | You bring new CEO, you bring new management. |
| 0:13.7 | It hurts the ego, right? |
| 0:15.2 | And you created this and you're no longer relevant. |
| 0:17.6 | I would have a public company right now if I, if I, if it wasn't for |
| 0:21.2 | like all those carrots that I gave and in candy bars and trophies. This is 20 VC with me, |
| 0:26.6 | Harry Stemmings, and I'm so excited for the show today. So I always remember the first time I went |
| 0:30.6 | San Francisco. I was 18 years old. I was at Sasta with Jason Lampkin and the hottest company of the time was Drift. And today I have one of their founders on the show, Elias Torres. |
| 0:40.6 | Elias is now the founder of agency, but before agency he co-founded Drift, which he sold for |
| 0:45.6 | $1.2 billion to Vista. |
| 0:47.6 | And before Drift, he founded Performable, which he sold to HubSpot. |
| 0:51.5 | But before we dive into the show today, Secureframe empowers businesses to build trust with customers |
| 0:56.4 | by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation. |
| 1:01.2 | Thousands of fast-growing businesses, including NASDAQ, Angel List, Doodle and Coder, |
| 1:05.9 | trust Secureframe to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards, such as SOC2 and ISO-271, |
| 1:14.4 | CMMC, NIST standards and more. |
| 1:17.1 | Backed by top-tier investors and corporations like Google and Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes's list of the top 100 startup employers for 2024, |
| 1:26.1 | G2's best software awards for higher satisfaction products, |
... |
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