YouSaid · the spoken record

Elias Torres

lines on the record: 97
first: 2025-03-21
most recent: 2025-03-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm an immigrant. Yeah, I'm just saying, but I'm just such a realist, right? I accept what it is. I don't let my pride try to, you know, my pride gets the best of me a lot of times, but I'm not going to be, I think that that was the smartest thing I did, right? It was not be emotional about it. A lot of people, even my investors would be like, yes, you're worth a billion now. You could be worth a billion. Multiply my x.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we built companies are too big, too inefficient, right? To be able to make things solvable. Like you said, right, these big companies that are now, right? If they do what Twitter did, if they reduced themselves to 20% and build an amazing product and are willing to break all their pricing models and revenues and change all of that, then they will survive.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speed, execution, the timing was off, right? I was so close to the LLMs being there to transform like what I'm doing now. So I'm excited for what I'm doing now, right? I get to start from scratch. And that's really good in a way. I wouldn't necessarily want to be transitioned into a large ship right now. It was tough. I don't think it was my greatest accomplishment, right? It's like I let people down. I let my customers down. I don't want to do that again.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many people, my problem, my fault on the product, not growing it, not making it better. You know, you want to make a product that the customers receive value right away, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the biggest failure in my life. I wanted to build something great. I wanted to build something sustainable, endurant, right? That the customers keep using and getting value out of the product, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sold a company to private equity, right? Why wouldn't I want to have a public company? I don't know. Maybe I don't want a public company.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm done changing for people, right? I don't care. It's like, you know what? Screw all that. You know what I mean? It's like, look, at Drift, we had 800 people. It was like I hired coaches. Watch me, give me feedback. You know, Alias, you should be more carrots here, more this. And that's why I would have a public company right now if it wasn't for all those carrots that I gave and candy bars and trophies.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the test. That's the test that I do. If they can't handle me and they want to work with me, then that's what has made the teams work that I attract.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The speed of my questions is how I probe. Show me, open up your computer. I want to see your Git right now. Show me what you committed. Show me your code. Let's discuss that. Did you really build that? Who was it? So I'm just like, I don't care about my questions. I just go bam, bam, bam, bang.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too intense. I'm too intense. Like, people are like, calm down. People go put glass door reviews, right? It's like, I hated interview with this guy, HubSpot. I hated an interview with this guy at Drift, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody wants to know the secret, right My hiring criteria is high agency. I have to have IQ. You have to have grit. You have to have execution speed. You have to be obsessed. The way that I recruit, I'm a weird engineer. Like, you know, people done all the psychology tests on my teams that I built and they're all like, this is the most extroverted engineering team I've ever seen in my life. And it's like, they're all so intense. They all talk to the customers. I tend to not hire like that many introvert engineers. What happens is that the way that I recruit is so intense, I'm so in your face. I need you to make a decision now. I'm going to ask you to go on the most dangerous expedition ever gone. You know, we got to take HubSpot public. We got to build drift from scratch. You know, we have to create, you know, fastest blah, blah, blah, this to 100 million in revenue. And so that just scares so many people. I just rub so many people the wrong way during my interview process.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, let's go travel. Let's go feed. Let's go farm. Like, I would go plant, you know what I mean? If I wasn't building agency, like I'll go have a farm and plant some beans and just watch them grow, right? There's other things we could do with ourselves. I want to learn how to paint. I just was at the Grand Egyptian Museum. Like, I want to go study that stuff. I want to learn it. I want to have fun. I want to think about different pharaohs and kings. There's so much we can be doing, right? But I'm not going to be like, let me take another job at Salesforce. That's great. No.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bullshit. It says you have had some guests here that I love and respect, but they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to get larger in five years. And I'm like, what? I just saw something somebody posted on Twitter. It's like, oh, we're going to hire a thousand new sales reps. I'm sorry. It's like if we're building the promise that we're going to, you know, AI is going to do the work of humans. I think that humans are going to do things differently, but at different companies, maybe their own companies. It's like, why don't we go serve other people? Why do we all have to be focused on all the B2B companies in the United States? There's the whole world out there. There's so many niches. There's so much things that need to be built to improve the lives of other human beings. While we all focus on the same market, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything needs to be done faster, right? The skill sets that you need, right? The people that you're looking for is very different, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely, of course. Of course. Because a lot less equity will be spent on the team because you're not going to need rounds and rounds and distributing equity after every round to hundreds and hundreds of people.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we'll have smaller teams, but we still need more compute. I mean, we're just really trading people for compute. So maybe not, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the way down to get resistance, right? And then when I bring her back to the CEO, they're like, yeah, I told the team to focus too many things. Yeah, yeah, I'll get back to you next quarter. That's why those companies are not going to last if they don't change fast enough.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should be owning that decision, and they should make sure that they drive it. But that's why I'm telling you if I see that in a company that has 2,000 people, what do you think is going to happen in a company that has 4,000, 10,000, 20,000, 40,000?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to take time because the people making the decisions, if the person at the top is making the decision, you know what they're going to decide. But when you're dealing with everybody in between, I get a lot of rejection right now. CEOs are making a big mistake right now. They're like, I talk to them and they're like, yes, this is what I want. I'm down. At least let's get agency in here right now. And then they pass me down to the next person and to the next person. I'm just telling like it is, right? I'm just, you know, this is my future customers. But I want CEOs to be held accountable, right? They say they want to make the company better and more efficient. Take care of the customer. When the decision trickles down, I'm an enterprise sales guy, right? I'm an engineer, but turn sales. So like I'm navigating the enterprise, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't keep hiring. I had 800 people, I had 200 in CS. You know how hard that was? I have public companies, friends of mine, right, that they're like, yes, help me with agency because I'm spending 30 million on CS. And it's not even the money. I have the money. We can kind of make it profitable. I can't hire fast enough and train them to support our customers. And then layers and managements and benefits and recruitment and onboarding. You understand how that just blows all that up? If you could train an AI to do that job and just have straight compute do it 24-7. Which one do you prefer? And so that's going to lead naturally to what smaller teams? It was not possible before. Now we have a hope. We are optimistic that that is possibly the future. Maybe it doesn't work out that way, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what they're kind of like in a pretzel, right? Every generation industrial, commercial, internet, SaaS, Web 2.0, whatever, right, it always assumed that larger was better. Everybody's dream was, I want to build a large company. We're entering a new world where the new proposition smaller is better. I mean, we always know smaller is better, but because we couldn't achieve billions in revenue without more people, we had no choice. Every big company today started small.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. How do you think I built HubSpot with the team? We created the small teams that you go operate in. You own that product. You're responsible for that product.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then when you go into those one-on-ones, nothing happens Why didn't you fucking tell me when we were in that one-on-one? And so, like, if my whole schedule is filled with one-on-ones, shoot me. Like right now at agency, I have no meetings with anybody. We're like 15 people. We have one meeting for the whole company, for the whole team. Show me what you did yesterday. Show me what you're going to do today. That's all we do in that meeting. The rest of the time I'm selling or I'm helping customers.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One on ones. It's like if you're not working with the person every day, why do you need this special time to go talk to this person? I hate it when somebody says, Elias, can we talk? Oh my God. You know, that's not good.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number of people, humans, where the blockage in terms of adopting AI and technology. You know, my last company, Drift before we sold to Vista private equity, right? It was 800 people. I was consumed. I mean, I know big companies that have 1,000 product managers. Just try to picture that Salesforce, right? Most of those people, like nobody gets fired for saying no. So everybody like will not buy the right product or will not build the right thing, right? It's easier to just coast. When you start spending all this time, all these people focus on promotions, on like, I got to go home. I'm working too hard. I have to send an email at the end of the week saying five things I did this week. It's like, you're toast. That's why they don't move fast because you have to get all these approvals. You know, when you're a CEO of a public company and you spend all this time reporting and analysts and press and all this other stuff, how much time are you spending with the customers? How much are you spending building the product?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see with Al Parena now. Process that's the future that I'm visualizing, right? How do we get to a truly a gentle where the LLM is doing the work for me?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To give you this insight, right? I think software that has been built in the past 20, 30 years had the assumption it was built kind of like we build cars. We build a car all around and we build the entire environment so a human goes and drives the car. It requires an operator. The future is not going to require operators. It's going to be building like driverless cars. They're completely different, right? Except that we are stuck with the roads and the signals and all this stuff. And so imagine when we can completely change transportation, right? What we're thinking is that we need to be building software with the assumption that I don't want to know how to drive the car or do all this effort. I just want to tell it where I want to go and when I want to go and maybe choose the route.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speed is everything. Speed is what creates the American dream, right? It's the opportunity. Speed creates the opportunity for others to win.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mate. You ask If it was speed, I responded to the speed question. I don't think they're moving as fast as we think they are. It looks fast, but it's not yet.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You said, are there moving? I did not argue with distribution. Yes, we're in agreement. Distribution, they win. And the other one is they have the points, they have the data too. Those are great assets that they have. But it's been like three years. It's been like five years since we had GPT.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and so they're reaping the benefit of being early, but nobody's using the product, it just doesn't work. The king is chat GPT, right? That's the one that everybody is adopting. And using it every day, but that's not the real solution. That's not the future. Copilot cursor is second, distance second, right? The elephants are not dancing. They're trying to dance.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that alcoholics was the first one you get. Good, great, great. We get there. And so I think that everybody's talking about how Google is struggling. Google just dropped the ball, right? They invented this Transformers paper and everything they put out doesn't work. Like notebook LM, the great one. Like it's already dead, right? The project. So it's like they're trying so hard, but they can't do it. Microsoft co-pilot. I felt like Microsoft, I was really impressed. I felt like Microsoft was moving investing in OpenAI was a genius. I mean, Satya is like as a businessman, like respect. Satya is the man, no doubt. And being that early, dropping all that money on OpenAI was genius changes the world, right? I mean, that is respect. And they had the advantage to adopt all of this early, but being, you know, search, you know, you have repression, they dropped the pall, right? Copilot everybody was like, they're just a head making all the money first. The problem is people, they just have so much hard time trusting someone.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I completely disagree. I think this elephants are just talking, they're singing, they're talking a big game. It's mostly talk. Google fucked it up. You know what I mean? It's like, can I curse here? Yeah, yeah, I understand.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's like IBM was, I worked in a very special group, right? This is the group that put IBM.com on the internet, right? But what I learned was that 400,000 person company just can't move as fast. Lou Gersner was the CEO at the time and wrote a book called Why Elephants Can Dance, right? And I don't think, I disagree with him. Elephants can't dance. I don't buy it, right? They claim they're dancing, but they don't. They can sing maybe.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just try to manufacture adversity. That's all I can for them. The good thing is that I had success when they were older because I had my kids so young. So they're only starting to get spoiled now. We're in London here, the whole family. And I said, you guys want to go to Cairo for the weekend? And they're like, want to see the pyramids? That would go hard, they said.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grid is everywhere, right? It's not distributed only to the people who have nothing. We just get beaten up so much that we develop it in larger quantities. But my kids are going to grow up different, right? They're going to have ability to work with my companies. They're going to have my network. They have my access. They have my money. I wrote a post on LinkedIn when I said, quit now your company, big company. It's time. Don't worry about that bonus. Don't worry about that title. Don't worry about that salary. And then my daughter's like, dad, why are you posting such things? Not everybody has the luxury that you have today. I didn't have the luxury that I have today when I first started, right? I have the right to post that. I'm not making stuff up. And she goes, yeah, the problem is me. I can't say those things because I had those things from the beginning.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would Yeah, it's like, why not? I lived in LA with my dad for two years. I never spent time with him except for this time, right? It was an emergency. In Nicaragua, there was a forced draft. You had to go to fight the war, civil war. And so my mom called him up and she's like, you have a dad. I'm going to send you to LA so you don't get taken to fight. And so I was like, I don't want to go to the mountains to fight. And I get to meet my dad. Let's go. And I get to go to the United States. And so I met him. So I spent there about two years. And he bought like a stolen computer. Like people came and sold him, you know. And so he put it in the garage and he said, go play with it. And so it's like an IBM computer, like, you know, in the 80s. And I would be typing my homework in this printer in WordPerfect and using Lotus 1, 2, 3. That was the beginning. That planted the seed that I was just attracted to this device and what he was able to do. I just enjoyed it.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. It still is 100%. It is the place where there is just more and more chance for you to accomplish all of your dreams.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Excited, you know, and Nicaragua was like, I could not have, I could never have a car, I could never have a job, I didn't, you know, there was no hot dogs, no burgers. You come to the United States and you're like, I was so excited because it was the land of the opportunity, right? I was chasing the American dream. So I could not be happier to give everything I had to that, right?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I came to the US because the home that we lived in was not even ours. So there was a revolution. You know, people, we lived in somebody else's home because they left because of the revolution in 79. During the revolution in 79. And so we lived in this home. And then after the communism toppled, like people came back and they wanted their property back. I had nowhere to live. I was literally homeless. I was just graduating high school. And luckily, because of my grandmother, she crossed the river, an immigrant into the United States. After being there for so many years, she was able to get as a green card, apply. It was the perfect timing. We lost our home. The green card came in. We had to come to the United States. We had no choice.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that hard compared when you live. I just came back from Cairo last night. It's tough. You see the slums, you see all these areas. It's hard to live in countries like that. I'm from Nicaragua. Life is not that hard for us in the United States, you know what I mean?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We put ourselves so many roadblocks. We're like, I can't start a company, it's too hard, right? And we're like, no, it's actually not that hard. Starting it, finishing and exiting is different. But I think we think everything's too hard. It's like if I tell a random person on the street, you can build an LLM yourself. Everybody's going to say it's too hard. Is it too hard? It's really not that hard. The code fits on like a page on the screen. It's really that small. That's the thing. It's like everybody thinks it's so hard, it's so hard, it's so hard. It's not that hard. I guess maybe it's because I grew up in a communist country, you know, with nothing and no future, no hope, that everything that I've done, I'm like, shit, that wasn't that hard. For example, people on my companies in the past, we get them gifts, we get them food, we get them free lunch and they go and complain or like this coffee is not that great. And I'm like, it's free. If you don't like it, go buy your own. They complain. The things that people complain in the United States are...”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My advice that I would give is different, right? It is true that things are going to be okay. Wherever you end up, it's going to be okay. It's about complacency is the secret of happiness, right? I would say that what I would tell my old self is that things are not as hard as they seem. That's what I would tell my young self.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You care less about some things. Yeah, absolutely. Right. We worry so much about the plumbing broke. You know, the car has, you know, do you need new tires? This trip got canceled. You have to pay this fee. So that is a huge, really, of stress that I just don't care about that stuff anymore. So that just takes like, I don't know, one third of the problems. And I'm just like, okay, I don't care. Just pay it. Move on.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People quit on me. I have many people churn as a customer. So you get beaten up so much that you just realize it's just going to be okay, right? And so when I say I don't care, it's not that I don't care. I do care, but I know it's okay. It's going to be fine, right? And so I just don't care a lot anymore, but I do care. You see how complicated it is?”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny because I tweet not that much. And when I do, Brian Halligan tells me, why are you tweeting? Get back to work, right? And so I kind of don't want to tweet because it's hard for me. But I really think it's a paradox. I think life is a paradox, right? We always want just one answer. And in my case, I just find myself saying that a lot. Like, I don't care. I don't care. And people are like always doubting. Like, do I care or do I not really care? What am I doing? And I'm just something that I found maybe it's something later in my life now and the success that I've gotten my family and all the things that I've been able to accomplish so far, you know, close to 50 now that allow me to realize what I care and what I don't care about, right? And so it's been easy. Another thing is that the life of an entrepreneur is really hard. Most people don't want to be rejected, right? Most people don't want to be told no. And so I've been said no so many times.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If this is the biggest failure in my life, I wanted to build something great. I wanted to build something sustainable to walk around in your own company and you don't matter anymore. You bring new CEO, you bring new management. It hurts the ego, right? And you created this and you're no longer relevant. I would have a public company right now if it wasn't for all those carrots that I gave and candy bars and trophies.”
2025-03-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source