@eliast
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Founder and CEO of @Agency — previously built @Drift, @HubSpot, and @Performable. Invested in @Klaviyo, @Finix, @PostScriptIO, and dozens more.
Boston, MA 🇺🇸
Joined March 2008
- Tweets4.7K
- Following1.4K
- Followers8.6K
- Likes7.4K
Elias Torres retweeted
We're helping world-class organizations like @klaviyo build agentic deployment platforms.
① Connect every agent (claude, codex, cursor…)
② Configure SSO via their IDP (Okta, Entra)
③ Now everyone can cook, securely®
What happens to SaaS once every company sets this up? I get this question a lot 😁
First, the data must come from somewhere. These apps only work if they can be infused with business data.
This is why we see the big enterprise SaaS players suddenly prioritize shipping CLIs and MCPs. Or dust off APIs they were neglecting for years.
The new 'procurement bar' will be how ergonomic your product is for *agents*, rather than humans. How easily they can navigate your ontology and work with your data.
Once that's in place, there's a long tail of SaaS applications that I suspect will never be bought again. They'll be generated. They'll be more secure, more performant, more modern, and tailored to each company's and employee's needs.
Engineers @klaviyo built an internal app platform on Vercel. In the first two weeks, 512 employees shipped 356 projects.
• Idea to live app in 3 minutes
• Apps are full-stack, on Klaviyo's databases
• Deployments are SSO-gated & private by default
vercel.com/customers/how-kla…
Elias Torres retweeted
Software was the first wave of AI. The physical world is next.
It's rare to see an AI company land its first four customers: all Fortune 500. @Magentic did.
The team wrote their first line of code at the @sequoia office. Welcome @felicis, and congrats Robin and Odhran on the $18M Series A 🚀
More below 👇
Elias Torres retweeted
Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow.
—Professor Richard Feynman
Elias Torres retweeted
Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit
— Nat Friedman
Do you set goals at 70 or 100? What type of founder are you?
I think 70 is soft.
100 is tough. But it really depends on the team grit you have.
Neither feels great when missed.
Friends always describe me as intense. I'm fast-moving, restless, and rarely free of conflict.
I'm no stranger to living on the edge. That edge is part of why I've gotten this far.
Because success rarely comes from seeking peace. It comes from taking risks, embracing discomfort, and staying in the fight when most people retreat.
Elias Torres retweeted
It was a website in the 90s/00s; it's a commerce agent in 2026.
Every business will have one (and this time with personalization out of the box). Excited to be doing this with @AnthropicAI, can build and ship a Customer Agent with commerce on @klaviyo today.
Elias Torres retweeted
.@naval on why you need to play in decades:
"Looking back on my career, the people who I identified as brilliant and hardworking two decades ago are all successful now, almost without exception. On a long enough timescale, you will get paid."
Elias Torres retweeted
The next couple of years are among the most important in history.
The economy is transforming an order of magnitude faster than ever before.
If you have the opportunity to work obsessively on an important mission and choose not to, you may regret it for the rest of your life.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s a balance.
You have to get angry. If you stop getting angry you are losing your ability to win.
“The lifestyle of an entrepreneur at its core is: I can take more pain than the other guy, and I'll prove it.”
“ There's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it.”
“ You almost start accepting it. Like, something bad happens and you don't even get mad.”
“ There are benefits. But you need to make sure you don't get so used to it that it doesn't even bother you. You can get so zen, you're unbothered.”
“ There's something special about the extra fierceness of being bothered, being upset about something that is wrong.”
— @travisk
Elias Torres retweeted
Puentes applications are open.
20 fellows from our first three cohorts already live in SF. They've become close friends and work at companies like @cognition, @vercel, @krea_ai.
Watch what our program is about directly from them.
Apply until September 10.
Elias Torres retweeted
Elias Torres and I go back more than two decades to our days at IBM, where we worked together on the cutting-edge WebAhead team. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of watching @eliast build multiple exceptional companies, including Drift, which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.2 billion.
When Elias began exploring what to build next, we spent countless hours experimenting with the new generation of AI tools. Those explorations ultimately became @agency, and @arrayvc was proud to be one of the company’s earliest commitments.
It’s incredibly rewarding to see this come full circle for Elias and the entire Agency team. I also love how this story mirrors our history; Elias now gets to build alongside his longtime friend, @abialecki, CEO of @klaviyo. At the end of the day, this business is built on relationships. The best partnerships often span decades blurring lines between business and friendships.
Congratulations to Elias and the entire Agency team. We’re excited to see what comes next!
The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.
spr.ly/6011B1Bn8x
Elias Torres retweeted
Big day for @eliast and the @agency team! @klaviyo has reached an agreement to acquire Agency, including their truly transformative technology and exceptional team.
More from @timt on why we invested in Agency's Series A, and how we saw they were defining what the future of customer relationships looked like from the start: menlovc.com/perspective/inve…
The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.
spr.ly/6011B1Bn8x
.@eliast, founder of @agency , on what he did after a $1.2 billion exit:
He is an immigrant. He has worked nonstop his entire life. And for the first time ever, someone told him to slow down.
"I just learned to be no one. To be nobody."
No title. No fund. No company. When people asked what he did, his answer was nothing.
"To be asked by people, who are you, what do you do, and I'm like, I'm doing nothing. It was a humbling experience."
He had to detach from the company, bring closure to it, spend time doing nothing, accept that, and then figure out what the next step was.
That was the work.
NEW: He sold Drift for $1.2 billion. Now, he's building to $1B in revenue with fewer than 100 people.
@eliast (Co-Founder & CEO of @agency) joins GTMnow.
He calls his $1.2B Drift exit his "biggest failure." And the lesson behind it is now the whole reason he's building again.
Companies already spend $6 on people for every $1 on software, yet even a 200-person team like Drift's touched only 4–5% of customers. The budget's there, but the coverage isn't.
Now, his new company Agency deploys AI agents that run a company's entire customer organization, proactively caring for and retaining every customer, not just the 5% a human team can reach.
Oh and they don't have titles at Agency!
They ditched titles on purpose because past 100 people at Drift, Elias got buried in meetings about levels and reporting, so at Agency everyone stays hands-on with customers and no one can say "that's not my job."
Highlights:
00:37 Why a $1.2B exit is his "biggest failure"
07:30 What Agency is: the post-sales customer organization
11:59 Make investors earn it before the check
18:22 Building a $1B company with under 100 people
22:50 "Sales is the last role we eliminate"
29:00 Everyone's a forward-deployed engineer, no titles
39:08 Hiring for hunger, not credentials
43:04 "Agents don't really exist yet"
45:34 Why humans are the real bottleneck to AI
Elias Torres retweeted
Prev Drift Co-Founder & CTO sold the company for $1.2 billion and is back in the founder seat.
@eliast is building @agency. Here are some "unconventional" ways they're building:
- No titles at the company. Nobody can say "that's not my job."
- Building to $1 billion (and more) in revenue with fewer than 100 employees.
- They don't use a CRM. Agency runs on its own product, which is the company's entire system of record for comms, tasks, projects, and customer follow-ups.
- 80–90% of the company is engineers, and everyone responds to and meets with customers directly.
- No product managers and no designers. Elias, co-founder Luke, and a few others share the PM load.
Loved sitting down with Elias to go deep on how he's building!
NEW: He sold Drift for $1.2 billion. Now, he's building to $1B in revenue with fewer than 100 people.
@eliast (Co-Founder & CEO of @agency) joins GTMnow.
He calls his $1.2B Drift exit his "biggest failure." And the lesson behind it is now the whole reason he's building again.
Companies already spend $6 on people for every $1 on software, yet even a 200-person team like Drift's touched only 4–5% of customers. The budget's there, but the coverage isn't.
Now, his new company Agency deploys AI agents that run a company's entire customer organization, proactively caring for and retaining every customer, not just the 5% a human team can reach.
Oh and they don't have titles at Agency!
They ditched titles on purpose because past 100 people at Drift, Elias got buried in meetings about levels and reporting, so at Agency everyone stays hands-on with customers and no one can say "that's not my job."
Highlights:
00:37 Why a $1.2B exit is his "biggest failure"
07:30 What Agency is: the post-sales customer organization
11:59 Make investors earn it before the check
18:22 Building a $1B company with under 100 people
22:50 "Sales is the last role we eliminate"
29:00 Everyone's a forward-deployed engineer, no titles
39:08 Hiring for hunger, not credentials
43:04 "Agents don't really exist yet"
45:34 Why humans are the real bottleneck to AI
Elias Torres retweeted
Testing a fundraising workflow with founders to cut it from weeks to mins:
1/ Founders focused on getting the story right.
2/ We fed the founder narrative & our feedback notes from @agency into @runable_hq to generate a deck with the company's brand, website & messaging.
30 minutes later founders had an 90% complete fundraising deck.
What takes weeks now takes minutes and no more back and forth between investors & founders!!
Let’s go! Proud of you!
Excited to be part of the team tackling our global efforts and to help spearhead our international investing alongside my partner @astrange!
We believe AI is the great equalizer. For the first time, billions of people can access PhD-level intelligence from a phone. Talent is more distributed than ever, and Silicon Valley is ultimately a state of mind.
We’re already seeing this shift play out. Great global companies are being born outside the U.S. and scaling faster than ever: ElevenLabs, Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Lovable, Decart, Manus, Sakana, Wonderful, and many others are just the beginning.
Our goal is simple: build a bridge between the United States and the world’s best founders, operators, and technologists — and partner with them to win globally.
We’ll also continue doubling down on immigrant founders in the U.S. through our Borderless network. Immigrants have founded or co-founded 59% of America’s privately held billion-dollar startups, including companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Ramp, Safe Superintelligence, Anysphere, Vercel, and RunwayML.
The next generation of category-defining companies will be born anywhere and scale everywhere, and we want to be the partner of choice for the founders building them.
Read More on Ben Horowitz Blog Post:
a16z.com/a16zs-global-missio…
