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Episode: Revolutionizing Customer Success with Agency’s Elias Torres
Author: Conviction
Duration: 00:31:18
Episode Shownotes
Today on No Priors, Sarah sits down with Elias Torres, CEO and founder of Agency, an AI agent for customer success teams. Elias shares his journey from growing up in Nicaragua to founding several companies, leading engineering at HubSpot, and selling Drift for $1B. He also discusses his work consulting
with OpenAI in 2022, which deepened his understanding of the business opportunity LLMs presented and inspired him to start Agency. In this episode, Elias offers a unique perspective on the future of AI and customer success, explaining how current software has fallen short and his vision for a new generation where customers have direct relationships, spend less time on tasks, and have software working invisibly on their behalf. They also discuss the evolving landscape of hiring as teams shrink, and Elias reveals his ambitious plan to reach $1B in revenue with fewer than 100 employees. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @EliasT Show notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:34 Elias’ journey to entrepreneurship 2:36 Growing HubSpot to IPO and founding Drift 6:19 Consulting with OpenAI, learning about LLMs, and diving into AI 9:35 Founding Agency to focus on customer success and AI-driven solutions 11:40 What will a customer experience look like in 5 years? 15:48 Company building in an era of AI, as a 5th time founder 18:32 Reducing headcount while raising the bar on hiring 20:35 Key challenges in building Agency and crafting a standout product 23:06 Addressing software flaws and transitioning to an era of intuitive, self-operating solutions 26:27 Timeline for the next-gen software revolution + the power of building from first principles
Full Transcript
00:00:05 Speaker_00
Hello, and welcome to KnowPriors. Today, we've got Elias Torres with us, repeat entrepreneur and CEO of Agency, which is working on enabling every company to make their customers successful. Elias is no stranger to entrepreneurship.
00:00:18 Speaker_00
He's founded four companies, led engineering at the juggernaut SaaS company HubSpot, and most recently sold his last business, Drift, for more than a billion dollars to Vista Equity Partners. Elias, welcome.
00:00:30 Speaker_02
It's a pleasure. It's been a dream of mine to be here with you.
00:00:33 Speaker_00
You're doing company number five. Can you just talk a little bit about who you are getting to this place?
00:00:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, absolutely. The journey, I think for me is what's interesting bits about it. I'm from Nicaragua. So I came first generation, could not speak English, right?
00:00:50 Speaker_02
Imagine me at the back of a McDonald's, you know, reading the printouts to founder number five, three times with Sequoia, you know, and out great outcomes, IPOs, et cetera. It's been an incredible journey, right? I worked at IBM for 10 years.
00:01:06 Speaker_02
And then I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just could not be inside of IBM. I needed to be free. I needed to have a chance of huge impact. And, and so here I am, I'm in Boston. That's another interesting bit, right? I'm not in the Valley.
00:01:20 Speaker_02
I came to Florida from Nicaragua, and then I had a shot at IBM in the Northeast. And I've been here ever since.
00:01:26 Speaker_00
You know, one tidbit I will insert because I feel like the tech community has somehow discovered that smart kids who end up in tech often do math competitions growing up. This has been going on a long time, guys.
00:01:38 Speaker_00
Elias, you were one of the math competition kids.
00:01:41 Speaker_02
I was in math competition. I wish I would be like, like an Andres or something like that. Right. But, but, um, yes, we're talking, let's say 1992, 91. This is Nicaragua, but I get picked somehow to represent the school nationally at this competitions.
00:01:58 Speaker_02
Right. I placed third in the country. It's not a great accomplishment, but the point you're making is that math is fundamental to this and the ability and the thinking is applicable. And when I came to the United States.
00:02:11 Speaker_02
I'm in a low income town in Tampa, Florida, low income school, public school. And somehow, again, I don't speak English, but somehow the math teacher says, do you want to be in math competitions? Mu alpha theta.
00:02:24 Speaker_02
And I'm like, sure, I'll join the nerd club. And I'm like, just had a blast there. I did have a lot of trouble with the word problems, but I was able to do well in the other ones.
00:02:36 Speaker_00
I want to talk a little bit about the last two journeys because HubSpot is a company that everybody knows that is like an important public enterprise SaaS business now.
00:02:49 Speaker_00
And you've done leadership at different scales, like coming out of even the success of HubSpot where you were leading engineering, like why go start Drift?
00:03:00 Speaker_02
I think my whole life has been a a journey of not having any clue what's what's ahead or what's possible.
00:03:09 Speaker_02
I mean, that math competition I had in Nicaragua to go to compete in Mexico, representing my country and meeting kids from all over Latin America was like mind boggling.
00:03:19 Speaker_02
Then I come to the United States and I'm in Florida and then you start like, you know, I don't know, like MIT and stuff like that. So there's always like more. It's just been fun not knowing what's ahead until you get there and taking HubSpot public.
00:03:32 Speaker_02
When Brian Halligan came to me and bought my company, Performable, so he's like, our goal is to take it public in the next year or two. I had no clue what taking a company public meant.
00:03:42 Speaker_02
I mean, we had 30 million in revenue, 200 employees when he said those things. Brian says, you're in charge. You and David can do anything you want with product and engineering. We've got to go public.
00:03:54 Speaker_02
And so my mind is like, okay, we're going public, but I have no idea what going public means. That naivete is great, right? We go public, a billion dollar company, three years, everything was great. We went from 30 to 130 million.
00:04:08 Speaker_02
I said, if Brian can do this, why can I do this too, right? It should be easy to go from zero to a hundred million. And that's why I left HubSpot, really. I was so naive thinking that was going to be easy.
00:04:22 Speaker_00
Well, you were not so naive that it didn't work, right? So your last company, Drift, it sold for more than a billion dollars and you could do it. And yet you told me you think of it in some ways as a failure, which is like a very
00:04:35 Speaker_00
odd, uncommon point of view on that sort of outcome. Why would you describe it that way?
00:04:41 Speaker_02
Look, I'm very happy with my life. I had almost no food growing up, right? So like to me, every year has been a better year than the one before for me ever since growing up. So like I have zero complaints. But when we left HubSpot,
00:04:57 Speaker_02
you know, to start a company, I left it at a billion dollars and I saw it grow to 30, right? And so as I'm building Drift- Oh, the goalposts moved, I see. The goalposts moved, right? So the day that we sold Drift to me was a very sad day.
00:05:15 Speaker_02
It did feel like a failure. It was super anticlimactic. It was literally, I was at home in bed, tired. It was like 11 o'clock. We've been waiting to sign the papers, you know, power of attorney.
00:05:26 Speaker_02
I just got a text from one of the lawyers, it's done, you know? And that day I felt nothing, right? And the next day it felt even weirder and weirder.
00:05:36 Speaker_02
It took a long time for all those things to clear up, what it meant to sell for a billion in cash, right? A company that we grew to a hundred million in revenue, eight years of hard work, but I lost the dream.
00:05:48 Speaker_02
of building a $30 billion company or taking a company public, right? And so I felt at that time, I was so tired, worked straight 45 years of my life, you know? And I was like, never taking vacations really.
00:06:02 Speaker_02
And I was worried that I didn't have it in me at the time. If you asked me, are you going to start something else? I would be like, I'm done. It's like, I'm like, how can I start over? I know, I know. So I was like, I'm done.
00:06:13 Speaker_02
It's like, people are like, I want to start a company. I go, that's stupid. Don't do it.
00:06:17 Speaker_00
So you took a minute, you're kind of hanging out for a while, then you started doing some consulting for OpenAI and like helping their customers. Like, where did the energy come from again?
00:06:27 Speaker_02
As Pat says, like I have the energy of a teenager. I was a little tired.
00:06:33 Speaker_00
You're aging in reverse. It's a little weird, Elias.
00:06:36 Speaker_02
It's a little weird. You too. We're lucky. What happened was I was tired. I was November of 2022. What happened?
00:06:45 Speaker_00
Chat GPT.
00:06:46 Speaker_02
Chat GPT.
00:06:47 Speaker_00
And the launch of Conviction, everybody. This is very important.
00:06:51 Speaker_02
At the same time? Yeah, it was, it's October. October, yeah. October, no, you knew, you stole the thunder. So I was in Brazil.
00:06:58 Speaker_02
Actually, technically, that was the first real vacation I took post-acquisition, because I worked, I stayed at Drift for almost two years. And I was there, and I kite surf, that's one of my hobbies. I have hobbies now, you know? Nice.
00:07:14 Speaker_02
Poor immigrant does not have hobbies, but now I have hobbies.
00:07:16 Speaker_02
For the first time, I felt like I get up in the morning, we'll kite surf in the afternoon, we just have breakfast, we feel the ocean breeze, just four of us, four friends, and we were just like kite surfing. And I'm explaining chatGPT to them, right?
00:07:31 Speaker_02
And I'm like, this is insane. I don't even know how to explain chatGPT. I don't know what an LLM is, October 2022, technically speaking. I knew BERT. I knew Word of VAC. I knew Transformers. I don't know this.
00:07:45 Speaker_02
And I'm like explaining to them why this is different. So that's the first moment. I had the Chad Chippentine moment where I was like, you know what, again, I missed the boat. What happens? Why wasn't I working for OpenAI? What wasn't, like, is this it?
00:07:59 Speaker_02
Is this game over? Many of us asked ourselves that question. People are still asking themselves this question. And so that was the first thing that happened, Catalyst.
00:08:09 Speaker_02
I've already gone through that journey of a post-exit founder, but I'm already coming to the conclusion. The only thing I know how to do is build and I want to learn. And so I get introduced to OpenAI just to do like one of those networking calls.
00:08:21 Speaker_02
And they tell me we're drowning. Customers are asking us for help. We're two, 300 people. We don't, we can't help them implement their own solutions. We don't have the bandwidth. So we're looking for people. We're trying the big firms.
00:08:38 Speaker_02
And it was an idea they were giving me. And I said, I want to do that. I want to do that. I don't know anything about it. I've never used the GPT API, but here I go. And so they were like, are you sure?
00:08:50 Speaker_02
They looked me up and they're like, is this what you want to do? And I said, yes. And so I did consulting for them and I started from, from the bottom, right? People were like, who are you?
00:09:00 Speaker_02
I was doing some support tickets for them, et cetera, explanations. But then I started getting contracts, like the NBA, you know, Ticketmaster.
00:09:10 Speaker_02
I'm in Dubai talking to customers, Red Bull, and I'm just having a blast with a small team, implementing agents, LLM apps, in Clavijo, one of the customers too. And is my whole world changes, right?
00:09:28 Speaker_02
It's like, this is the dream as an engineer to build solutions that are this intelligent.
00:09:36 Speaker_00
Okay. So you come around to the idea that you have this like capability that you're actually really inspired about. How did you end up thinking about customer success?
00:09:45 Speaker_00
Like, can you can sort of give us a line about, you know, what agency is and then landing on that idea? Yeah.
00:09:50 Speaker_02
I mean, agency is really. the lessons learned in all my prior four companies, right? Startups, we know how to like build products. I mean, we know how to raise money, hire people, build products. We know how to sell it.
00:10:05 Speaker_02
Sometimes we know how to market them, but I don't believe we know how to take care of our customers, especially in the B2B. I think managing customers, both at scale, when you have tens of thousands or a hundred thousands of customers,
00:10:18 Speaker_02
It's, I don't think anybody has the answer to do that. Right. This is something that happened in the past 10 years. And, um, uh, we're, we're struggling as companies. Right.
00:10:28 Speaker_00
How'd you end up focusing on CS?
00:10:30 Speaker_02
Yeah, I ended up focusing on CS because one of the, one of the customers that I started with, I'm a good friend with Andrew. So Andrew used to work with me at Performable, Andrew Bialecki, CEO of Klaviyo. Boston-based company, amazing success IPO.
00:10:44 Speaker_02
I did some consulting for him. And one of the ideas was how do we help scale the customer success organization, right? At Drift, I built in 2019, the first AI SDR. But now I was helping, how do we help customers at scale?
00:11:02 Speaker_02
Because he has hundreds of thousands of customers.
00:11:05 Speaker_02
So when I started solving that problem, which was a little bit of applying my experience between marketing and LLMs, is when I realized the amount of help that we can provide as a company to help scale
00:11:20 Speaker_02
benchmarking, reporting, inside generation, idea creation to the customers that they have, right? At scale. Because it's something that humans struggle, right? To do that in a very detailed manner. And so that's kind of where the idea was born, right?
00:11:36 Speaker_02
It was like, wow, I can do this for all B2B companies.
00:11:40 Speaker_00
What do you think CS looks like five years from now? It's not been a focus of a lot of AI applications today. One would argue that investors and CEOs often don't think of it as like super strategic.
00:11:53 Speaker_00
You can be better or worse at it, but does it become much more powerful somehow?
00:11:57 Speaker_02
I think CS is everything. I think the word CS maybe is the misnomer. I think that that's where people are getting lost. I think, no offense, right? But, you know, VCs are like saying, oh, here's CS, here's a category.
00:12:09 Speaker_02
How many software companies are in it? What's the time? How much is the revenue? Add up the valuations. Is that something that we're interested in? I'm not necessarily interested in CS, right? I'm interested in customers.
00:12:20 Speaker_02
I've been in the pre-sales world for like 15 years. I know that like the back of my head. I'm a true customer obsessed founder, right? All my companies, I'm the one who services the customers.
00:12:35 Speaker_02
And when I went to HubSpot, I went from 20 customers to 5,000. And I was crying because I couldn't, they called me and they would say, Elias, help me get on the screen and help me fix the product. Help HubSpot, fix HubSpot for me.
00:12:49 Speaker_02
And I would say, no, I'm sorry. I have 5,000 customers. So the moments where I stopped servicing my customers, like if they were the only one, my soul gets crushed. because the company shifted, right? And so that's what I want to solve today, right?
00:13:03 Speaker_02
So that it's not CS what I'm trying to solve is how do we service the customer? How do we give? the power, the agency to the customer itself. I'll give you an example. Like, I like to have personal relationships with the business that I work.
00:13:19 Speaker_00
Ah, yes. This very much. Yeah.
00:13:21 Speaker_02
Right? Like, for example, I have a guy that in the winter I have to store a car to, right? And so I can text, he has a warehouse. He saved his space for me and I can text him. He lives down the street and he can come and pick me up.
00:13:35 Speaker_02
We can take the car, drop off. And he's super flexible to me, to my needs. Right. I'm in charge of the relationship.
00:13:42 Speaker_01
Yes.
00:13:42 Speaker_02
I go to my barber. I just, I just booked two, two haircuts on Saturday for my son and I, my second son says, can I come? And I said, you text Mel and you go and say like, uh, see if we can squeeze us in.
00:13:54 Speaker_02
So he texts Mel and says, okay, I'll squeeze you in, in the two, in the two slots. Right. And so I like that experience. Can we have that experience with like a service now today? Can you text?
00:14:06 Speaker_02
You know, it's like, we want, I want to be able to provide businesses of the future, the ability to put the customer in charge.
00:14:13 Speaker_00
Yes. At scale too.
00:14:14 Speaker_02
At scale. With hundreds of thousands of customers. That's the essence.
00:14:20 Speaker_00
Yeah, I was gonna say, this is actually something I believe very deeply about venture, which is like, I do not want a bunch of, could be conceivably very talented people, like between me and the founders that I, you know, owe support and partnership and work to, because I don't have any of the contacts, I don't care as much as I do.
00:14:39 Speaker_00
And I think it's like, you know, not a great experience when there's like four layers of people who are passing around some task for a founder. But it does mean venture doesn't scale if you're doing it in a particular way.
00:14:53 Speaker_00
And I guess that's true of many customer relationships with an owner of the product.
00:14:58 Speaker_02
I think you and I are alike, right? I want to disrupt how startups work. I want to break the status quo, right? Which is what you just said. You don't want four layers of people between you and the founders, right? And so the same is with me.
00:15:13 Speaker_02
At agency, there's only going to be one email address. It's Elias at agency.inc.
00:15:18 Speaker_00
It's very dangerous, man.
00:15:20 Speaker_02
Everyone will email. I will always like take care of all the customers, right? Um, that's the company of the future. Cause at Drift I had 800 people, like 250 in the, in the, in the customer organization.
00:15:33 Speaker_02
That, that cannot happen again because it wasn't working. Right. That, that number of people didn't necessarily solve the problem. Right. And that's something that every other company is struggling with. And so I want to maintain that relationship.
00:15:45 Speaker_02
And so the only solution out of this is by leveraging AI.
00:15:48 Speaker_00
I want to talk a little bit about like how you think about company building now, um, both in the era of AI and then also like fifth time around. You don't want 800 people. You say like, I think I can get to a billion, you know, is that, is that value?
00:16:01 Speaker_00
Is that revenue?
00:16:02 Speaker_02
Uh, I would think revenue.
00:16:04 Speaker_00
Yeah. That's a better one.
00:16:05 Speaker_02
Value is too, is too easy.
00:16:07 Speaker_00
Yeah. Okay. The goalposts move. It's a billion in revenue. That's a good goal.
00:16:10 Speaker_02
It's a billion in revenue.
00:16:10 Speaker_00
With a hundred people. How do you not hire the other 700 people?
00:16:14 Speaker_02
We have to question everything. I'm a big fan of Elon, right? I think I heard him speak about like, you know, he just thinks about building a rocket and he says, well, how much does it cost to build a rocket, right?
00:16:25 Speaker_02
And instead of just saying like how much the parts cost at the existing marketplaces, right? It's like, well, I'll just build the part, right? It's like, it's a metal. I think the same way, right?
00:16:34 Speaker_02
It's like, I have to produce something that has high value and that is very rare, right? There's two ways to make a lot of money, right? A billion dollars. You either have something that,
00:16:43 Speaker_02
A lot of small businesses can acquire for free, right, with very little marketing costs. Or you sell something that is very, very expensive, right, to enterprise customers.
00:16:53 Speaker_02
And so I'm picking to choose something to solve very, very, very big problems for big enterprises. Second, I think I want to challenge, like Paul Graham says, do things that don't scale. I think that that's game over for that statement, right?
00:17:09 Speaker_02
I think now we only have to do things that scale. I already know all the things that I could do before that not scaling. I could always throw a body at something and be like, okay, let's, you go do that. I think you said it in a tweet recently, right?
00:17:22 Speaker_02
And at X, and you're like, can we just hire an intern, right? And then I think for an hour, somebody says, well, we can throw Devin at it, right? It's like, that's the thinking that we need to have, right? Do not do things that don't scale.
00:17:33 Speaker_02
I already know that they will work for a year and then they're going to break in a year. I now have to solve the things right from the first place, right? What are the fundamentals, right?
00:17:44 Speaker_02
Customer intelligence, customer communication, understand the problem deeply, get pricing right, get pricing better, build the right relationships with the right customers. Who's gonna take you there, right?
00:17:57 Speaker_02
I'm building a company at a much faster speed. It's only been a few months, but I'm already much further ahead than Drift was almost three years in, right?
00:18:07 Speaker_02
When it comes to understanding my passion, what I'm trying to solve, how big the problem is, the market, my position as a company, the team, the engineering organization, the infrastructure, the branding, the marketing, I'm moving at a speed that I just never felt before.
00:18:25 Speaker_02
And it just feels natural, partly because of AI and partly because of my experience.
00:18:31 Speaker_00
What advice do you have for people who, I think like one reaction is like, oh man, if you can get to a billion dollars in revenue with only a hundred employees, it's like, I want to be part of the hundred employees, right?
00:18:43 Speaker_00
Like what makes those people valuable and special in their work? Like how do I end up in that last hundred folks?
00:18:50 Speaker_02
You're asking for something very deep right here. But I'm going to say I'm going to say as much as I can, because I really don't care anymore. I look as a founder. I see founders all the time doing this.
00:19:01 Speaker_02
By the way, I was part of three incubators this time around. I'd never been part of an incubator until now, until my fifth time. And I got to spend a lot of time with a lot of first time founders.
00:19:10 Speaker_02
And it was it was amazing because he gave me a little refresher of what I was like, you know, the first time around. And so I see a lot of founders of keep making so many mistakes in hiring. I've made them all too, right?
00:19:25 Speaker_02
Too many times you get excited, you meet someone and they say the things like, I want to work for you.
00:19:30 Speaker_02
I'm going to make your company get to a billion dollars in revenue, you know, 25% faster than you think, you know, they say all this right things and they're available and they give this pitches and. And I no longer buy any of those things.
00:19:43 Speaker_02
I've hired every executive, every C-level suite that you can think of multiple times. I have hired from the best companies. I have hired people that went from zero to 200 million in revenue in four years. I've hired them all. I know them all.
00:19:57 Speaker_02
I'm much more disciplined in my interview process. And no one joins agency until they have worked for me as a contractor. I'm going to put you to work and I am going to be real, exactly how I am with everybody in the company today.
00:20:12 Speaker_02
And if you don't deliver at a level that is world-class in that one or two week timeframe, there will be no room for you, right? And I'm focusing mostly on engineers right now. Everybody has to have a clear role of what they do.
00:20:28 Speaker_02
It's very difficult to be part of this 100, right?
00:20:32 Speaker_00
What's on the other side then? What do you think is going to be the hardest thing about building agency?
00:20:36 Speaker_02
Building agency is always, always about product. It's always about change management. Everybody thinks that, oh, I just put an LLM on it, generate some stuff, summarizes a meeting and
00:20:50 Speaker_02
Bop, bop, here's the next CRM, here's the next customer platform, right? No, no, no, no. It's like being in the weeds, building the product is the hardest part. LLMs are solving one tiny part of the problem. We still have to build the products.
00:21:08 Speaker_02
that solve a specific problem, the solution, right? If everything was just passing it to the LLM and it does it, but we have to transform organizations from very large organizations struggling.
00:21:20 Speaker_02
It's a lot of chaos in the customer and the post-sales organizations. that we need somebody to go in and understand them, talk to them, nurture them, see what's broken and slowly transition into the future, right?
00:21:36 Speaker_02
It's not something, I've talked to CEOs of public companies and no CEO comes to me and says, I want to change everything right now. Just throw it all away, let's swap it.
00:21:44 Speaker_02
And so most companies don't understand that that change management is the hardest part to get through. building a product that people can use, gaining trust from an LLM.
00:21:55 Speaker_02
I mean, people are, people like, it's okay if you get the summary of a meeting from an LLM, like nobody cares, right? It's like, whatever, it's great. Look at this. I can read faster.
00:22:06 Speaker_02
But to trust the output of an LLM to send an email to a million dollar customer. It's like, you know, when you present that to a, to a CSM, they're like looking at it and they're like, they questioning every word.
00:22:19 Speaker_02
You have no idea, they're questioning every word in that email. Yet when they're writing their emails, they're not questioning their words, right? And they're just as bad. And so it's like, we have a long road ahead for this.
00:22:31 Speaker_02
This is a problem that there's not one solution to it, right? This is not one LLM or one foundational LLM is gonna be able to fix. I don't know, AGI will solve everything, but whatever. I don't, it's not, I'm not worried about that.
00:22:49 Speaker_02
I'm really worried about what is it that I want to build as I listen to the customers, right? To my customers and how do I take them where I want to take them, right? And then do they want to come along in the journey with me?
00:23:03 Speaker_00
I want to take the last few minutes and talk a little bit just about the software industry, because, you know, for somebody who's been building software for like 30 years, you're pretty anti-software now.
00:23:16 Speaker_00
Like, as somebody who's quite dismissive of like, oh, I've just been putting shit in databases and taking it back out. Like, explain yourself. Like, what, you know, why do you, why do you think that's so irrelevant?
00:23:28 Speaker_02
People are like, oh my God, like AGI is gonna, you know, enslave humanity. What's gonna happen, right? I'm telling people like, they're enslaved today.
00:23:36 Speaker_02
We make fun of it, but like, who wants to be a sales rep, you know, that after you finish a meeting, goes and puts like a task to remind you, to remind the customer to do something else, to put, I mean, like, it's just like, I just think it's utterly ridiculous that we just, like the emperor has no clothes.
00:23:55 Speaker_02
Nobody wants to say anything about this. Our software is shit. Everything is ridiculous. I mean, there's, there's no good software out there. Uber is great, right? Cause you need to go somewhere, you call it, shows up and he takes you there, right?
00:24:08 Speaker_02
That's good. Fantastic.
00:24:09 Speaker_00
That's the one software product Elias likes. Okay. Uber.
00:24:12 Speaker_02
I just want people to realize that. Why do you want to enter all this information in all the systems? And if it doesn't do anything for you, for example, that agency, should I install a CRM? Should I, should I install Salesforce?
00:24:26 Speaker_02
Why would I buy Salesforce? It's a monstrosity of a software that I would have to hire somebody else to go configure. And then I don't know how to use it.
00:24:36 Speaker_02
And then that person that is gonna configure it for me, do you think that person knows how to do business better than I do or knows my customers? They don't. And so they're gonna tell me some antiquated way of working with my customers and what to do.
00:24:50 Speaker_02
And then I have to hire people to put stuff into the software. And then I have to have people to manage those people to monitor what they put into that software. At what point did we talk to the customer?
00:25:03 Speaker_02
I mean, like I'm telling CEOs, you should just throw away your instance of Salesforce, just throw it in the trash. Like, it's like, what is it doing for you? We're just so busy configuring it and sending data to it.
00:25:15 Speaker_02
And we don't ever use the data that is in it. And so software has to transform to do things for me. without me even asking. Like we are in the era where like, hey, Elias, you're going to speak in San Francisco.
00:25:33 Speaker_02
There's a calendar of a jet blue flight on my entry into my calendar. It should read it. Let me look at everybody that always asks you to grab coffee in San Francisco and send them a message. I'm in town and I'm in town from this day to this day.
00:25:46 Speaker_02
And this is and lock out, you know, two hour slots every day and say, if you want, meet me here. I'm going to be at this coffee shop and let's catch up.
00:25:55 Speaker_02
Prioritize that my customers that I'm trying to chase and send them two weeks in advance messages that are repeating every three days, right? Why can't we have software that does that? That sounds useful, right? It's a, that's the level that we want.
00:26:11 Speaker_02
Like, you know, it's like when you can text someone, it just gets done. Like that's, that's wealth, right? And so we want software to, to, to make us feel wealthy, right?
00:26:20 Speaker_00
Yes, I do not feel wealthy from my software today.
00:26:23 Speaker_02
Exactly, right?
00:26:26 Speaker_00
How long does it take for this to happen? Like for this disruption of software that enslaves us to free us? And does anybody get to stick around?
00:26:37 Speaker_00
Like does anybody from the old world of the databases holding our data and creating these workflows get to sustain?
00:26:46 Speaker_02
I think there's a lot of infrastructure that is needed, right? So there's good news for that, right? We're going to need places to store this information. We need the internet, right?
00:26:55 Speaker_02
I'm talking at the solution level, the old wrappers of databases are going to be dead. Like there's just no way they survive unless they adapt quickly.
00:27:05 Speaker_02
What we're missing is more people like us at agency where we're thinking fundamentally from first principles and saying, let's build this new type of software. That's the word that we need to spread, right?
00:27:16 Speaker_02
Is stop like, I see all these new CRMs coming up, right? And they're like, it's still the same views, the same tables, except they have like AI computed table. We need to fundamentally think software that is almost invisible, right?
00:27:29 Speaker_02
I think that we need more people thinking this way and not just like, oh, let me just improve, you know, Workday or let me just improve, you know, Augusto or this.
00:27:40 Speaker_02
We need to be thinking how do we really solve the customer problems from a different perspective. Laziness, don't bother them. Don't tell them what you're going to do. Just do it. get verification, right?
00:27:52 Speaker_02
Ask for suggestions, learn with the customer, how they're like, what they like, and create that personalized experience. We need more people to do that.
00:28:01 Speaker_02
Once we have examples of that software, which is what we're doing at agency, I think more people are going to see and say, okay, that's where we should go. And because of the LLMs, a lot of people are going to be able to build things much faster.
00:28:12 Speaker_02
And then the big rebuilding will begin.
00:28:14 Speaker_00
I hope that happens. I hope I get to be part of some of these companies. You know, what you said that really speaks to me. I work very hard. I have some talents. I'm a very disorganized person.
00:28:25 Speaker_00
And I felt bad about this for like most of the last two decades. But I think if you were more ambitious about the expectations you'd had for software, you might say like, well, why am I filing shit anyway and labeling shit anyway?
00:28:43 Speaker_00
And like trying to force all of this into some project management or database framework or whatever for coordination purposes, like it feels like we should be able to accept humans as they are. Because I'm like, all right,
00:28:57 Speaker_00
Not that operationally disciplined, but there are a lot of people who don't want to be organizing their data all the time, just like me. And so maybe that'll be the better way.
00:29:08 Speaker_02
I think you have incredible strengths, right? To be where you are, to have achieved what you have achieved is because you're special and talented, right? The good thing is that you don't need organizational skills as a necessity.
00:29:23 Speaker_02
It's not a need for you to become more successful than you are today, right? The good thing is that that's exactly what AI and the computer should solve for you. I hate doing, I challenge everything.
00:29:34 Speaker_02
If I don't need to do something, like for example, when I first came here, I'm terrible at writing in English, right? And then every time before Chachi P'tee came out, I would be like, Maybe I should learn that skill.
00:29:47 Speaker_02
I mean, you know, you know that theory about the buckets that there's like five levels of something mediocre and then really bad and then really good, that it takes like 10 years to shift buckets, you know, to be like, to go from average to like, you know, top.
00:30:02 Speaker_02
And so it says focus on the things where you only have to move one level up. to be better, don't try to go from the one that you're the poorest to the top, right? And so wherever you're not good at, just let it be.
00:30:14 Speaker_02
And the beauty is organization, like AI should tell you everything, my questions, what to ask me, prepare context, and you shouldn't lift a finger, but you can do your magic interviewing people.
00:30:26 Speaker_02
And that's, AI can't do that, you know, because it's you.
00:30:29 Speaker_00
Okay, just to be clear, I came up with the questions this time, but in the future, I very much look forward to being told what to do with the prep the minute before and actually setting my avatar. It's going to be great.
00:30:41 Speaker_00
And then you and I can just get a beer and that'll be it.
00:30:43 Speaker_02
Exactly. But that's what matters, right? It's the relationship, right? It's the friendship.
00:30:48 Speaker_00
I think this is great.
00:30:49 Speaker_02
I think this is good.
00:30:50 Speaker_00
Okay.
00:30:51 Speaker_02
One shot. We one-shotted the whole podcast.
00:30:54 Speaker_00
Thank you for the conversation, Elias. It was great. Find us on Twitter at NoPriorsPod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
00:31:08 Speaker_00
That way you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.