Name: Brainstorm AI 2024: What it Takes to Build A Startup in the AI Era
Uploaded: 2024-12-10
Duration: 9 min 34 s
Description: Presenter: Elias Torres, Founder and CEO, Agency

Presenter: Elias Torres, Founder and CEO, Agency

Brainstorm AI 2024: What it Takes to Build A Startup in the AI Era

Conferences

This is, this is my first time speaking here and it's the first time I got makeup done. So I hope you like it. My slides are not working but OK. Who needs slides? There you go one more. There you go. So I guess this slide is here to tell you that I'm an entrepreneur. I have a problem in my head because I can't stop doing this right. This is my fifth time correction to run it. Uh not five exits. But here I am definitely addicted to this. But in reality, my last company Drift, I sold to Vista and I could have retired. But thanks to the open A I people, the team, they build this great, amazing technology that made me rethink everything and come back because what really happened to me at Drift was that as a founder, I always get to interact with customers directly and I'm just passionate about that and I get to work with, with the customers, they text me, they have direct access to me to my everything and I love doing that right? And that's why I think I've had success because I love my customers. But what happens is that as I get, have success and I grow and I have more customers, I don't have the time anymore for them. And so I think this is kind of probably what happens to you. Tell me how many of you are able to dedicate as much time as you want to, all of your customers raise your hand. Can you do that? What we got to be a little bit more ambitious than that? And so what I would say is that I really struggled with that when I, when I sold the company performable to hubspot, I um I had all these like about 100 customers, about a million in revenue 2009, 2011. And then Hubspot had 5000. And I remember just like when they would call me, I would say sorry, but I have 5, 5000 other customers. I have to build what they need. And so that kind of broke my heart and, and that same thing happened at Drift, right? And so what I'm doing now, right? It really um thinking how I can solve this problem. How can I help all of you take care of your customers? Like if they're the only one anybody interested in that? Right? That's it. Nobody. OK. Just but you gotta like say it, I'm Latino here like we gotta like show your emotions. And so what I'm really here to tell you, right? I think that the title of my talk is like, how do we build companies in the age of a I? So I just want to leave you with some basic thoughts uh in the short amount of time that I have, right? That is like the first thing is that, are you ready for this? Forget everything that you know, question everything that you hear. I hear a lot of founders right now. You know, I'm fortunate, very fortunate for an immigrant come here when I was 17, long time ago to be able to be in the States here with you today. But a lot of people that are starting companies now don't know. Right? When do you hire your first salesperson? When do you hire your first support person? Customer success? We are always looking for advice. Can you believe this is 2024? We have cha GP T cha GP T pro $200 a month and we still don't know how to run our businesses. It's crazy how hard it is right to know how to scale with the amount of customers and the time that they demand from us. And so I feel like we're always looking for advice and we contact other people and we say, tell me how can I do this, how can I do this better? But I'm here to tell you that we kind of have to maybe if we want to look at the past, we're gonna have to forget look at the past and hear what they have to say but not do it that way because A I has changed everything. I, I am so excited of building a company. I went to Sequoia and I opened my big mouth and I said, I'm gonna never hire more than 100 people. And I'm going to get to a billion in revenue and they believed it. Three B I hope they're not watching this. This is being recorded. And so what I said was something that I fundamentally believe, right? My last company, I had 800 employees and it was really hard to build a sustainable business that way, right? A lot of our companies are not profitable. And so we have to figure out how to do this more efficiently and how to do a better job of relating and connecting with our customers. And so the things that I'm doing in this company, everything is being done from the ground up through first principles. I'm challenging everything that normally entrepreneurs would do when they're building a company. So for example, in the past, I've hired as, you know, besides the founders, I've hired like an NBA person, anybody of you hired an NBA person to do great things, all this stuff you don't want to do, right? It's great. They like, they make slides and they like, I don't know, they make slides and, and they make slides, right? And so like, it's great, you don't have to, I don't have to make slides. But then another company I did, my first hire was a recruiter because that's the best way you need people to build great things. Guess what I hired for the first time this time besides engineers. Anybody guess customer support. No, I hire a lawyer. So now my first employee was a lawyer. So this lawyer, it was too early. You would think you don't need a lawyer when you're like 10 employees. But this lawyer does all the contracts. Her name is Z and she also does payroll. She also does it, she does security because we use a platform called rippling. And so we have to do more with less, we have to hire less and people have to be willing to do more because we have the power of A I, we are not, you know, I I'm doing all the sales. I'm, I'm an SDR, I'm a, I'm an A E, I'm an onboarding specialist. I'm a customer success manager. In fact, if you check me out on linkedin, my title is customer success manager and um and I'm support. So my company, I'm doing things differently. I'm challenging the norm. For example, my company, there is no support at agency that inc there will never be the only email you will use is my email. Every single customer from now on forever will email me because that's my responsibility. I'm not going to let it happen what happened before where I lost, I lost track of my customers. Right. And I'm going to use agency my own company to do so. So we have to spend less and we have to learn more. We have to challenge the norms. You see companies like Klarna that they're ditching salesforce. I didn't say that I didn't say anything bad about be off, but this is public information and they're ditching work day and they're ditching this and they're ditching that and that might not work for everyone but it might work for you. We are living in the future and you have to question those things that you thought cannot be changed in order to build the companies that would generate a billion in revenue. Just a small group of powerful and efficient people. For example, one more thing, it's like I will never use the CRM. Why, why would I buy a fiat? Right? Anybody here uses the CRM, raise your hand if you use the CRM, do you guys like your CRM? Keep your hands up if you like your CRM? Ok. Nobody does. We need to start demanding more out of software. I am here guilty to apologize. I've built software for about 30 years. Uh The makeup is hiding some of that stuff, but the reality is that most of the software that we built in the past sucked. It's terrible. I think we're worried about A I enslaving us. The old sufferer was slaving us. I mean, like if you, you guys got to go home and update your records, put in tasks and reminders to contact Elias to see if he can help you. God forbid. That's terrible. Right? And so I'm not building that, I'm not using that. I'm not building that again. I'm just telling you that we need to demand more of the software builders of the future to build software that serves you and you don't serve it, right? That understands and makes sense of all that unstructured data. You saw Romaine do that. Amazing demo, multimodality, talking to it translate in every language. I have a customer in France, they have customers in Italy, they have customers in Germany and everything is working well because we have powerful technologies like today. So I hope I left you with some thinking to do to challenge the norms, think differently and demand more from the tools that you use today. Thank you very much.