Always Dreaming Bigger with Elias Torres

This is a guest post by Elias Torres. Elias is CTO and co-founder of Drift, a conversational marketing and sales platform. Torres is a serial entrepreneur and community activist passionate about supporting LatinX entrepreneurs across the US. He previously served as VP of engineering at HubSpot.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned since I immigrated to the United States was to be a curious learning machine. By opening my eyes, it enabled me to see what others were doing, and that’s when I began to dream really big.

At first, I dreamed of owning a home for my mother and my brothers, then I dreamed of an education, a professional career at a global company, and a family. I achieved those dreams, and all these great accomplishments should make anyone happy, and they did—for a little while.

Then, after I saw many leave our cushy jobs to join or launch startups, I too dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. I was naive; I wanted it for no exact reason other than maybe those left around me didn’t share my ambition to dream even bigger. I needed to meet others that would help me dream bigger. That’s why I left a $100K+ job at IBM after almost ten years to jump into the startup world.

Jumping into the Startup World

At first, all I dreamt of was to not get laid off from a company, then I dreamt of starting my own. Once I started a company, I realized that there needed to be a goal, an exit. Before I knew it, my first big moment arrived, and we sold our company for $20M+. 

Raising a young family, surviving long commutes, living paycheck to paycheck, those almost two years felt like an eternity and a blink of an eye simultaneously. So many first time experiences—mostly painful at the time—that I now cherish as the good ol’ days, the days when we were young and naive, yet so full of hope.

Being thrust into launching a company for the first time wasn’t easy, but I had to hold on to every experience from the past to make it work. I had to draw from my childhood experiences under a communist regime to do more with less, to be persistent, to think ahead, and to work with people to accomplish team goals.

As a first-time founder, I had to learn how to give up my ego and realize that all that really mattered was doing the work. But the hardest thing was that I had to wear every hat and worry about every single problem—which turned out to be one of my most valuable skills.

Launching an IPO

After selling our company, I joined HubSpot. There, the next dream became launching our very own IPO. I didn’t think of the negatives, but simply focused on putting in the work. After three hard years of intense but incredibly fun work, we helped grow HubSpot to almost $1B in the public markets.

This was my first scale-up experience. Now we were part of a team and I no longer had to worry about every problem, except for delighting our customers with our product. I could devote all of my energy to learning how to build a scalable product. However, the most important lesson I learned was to recruit amazing people with limited resources and time. That’s when I learned my motto: I build teams, products follow.

But—by now you know the drill—I still wanted to dream even bigger. After the IPO, we asked ourselves: What if we could start a company from scratch that reached a similar milestone?

Starting Drift

So I started another company with my Latino co-founder David Cancel and—to make the story short, but not easy—we sold our company Drift for over $1B to a top-tier global private equity firm called Vista, just shy of seven years after its inception. 

Drift was a surreal experience. Is it possible to hit the ball three times in a row? Here’s how I did it:

• I only dreamt it was going to work and never really thought about failure.

• I focused on a single problem at a time.

• I made sure I stayed open to learn and receive feedback constantly.

• I evolved constantly through mistakes and coaching to make sure progress was made.

• And—my personal favorite—I developed an intuition for making trade-offs and wearing multiple hats on a daily basis: I had to one day be a coder, another a manager, another a sales rep, another a recruiter, and another a founder.

One thing is for sure, there was never a dull moment. But the most difficult thing was having the responsibility of hundreds of people and their careers and livelihoods.

The pandemic was especially difficult for all of us, but I think it’s when I grew the most. That’s because it was during the pandemic that I was able to achieve something that to some might feel normal, but to me, will never be underappreciated: An acquisition event that changed the lives of so many of our team members, their families, and their financial well-being. This acquisition served as proof that Latinos can play at the highest levels of entrepreneurship in the world.

Now, as I write this, I’m thinking, what should I do next? If anything, why not dream that my next goal is to once again become an entrepreneur, an owner, and that my personal net worth will go from multi-millions to multi-billions?

As I embark on this journey, I hope I also have more clarity about my responsibility to the Latino community in the US and Latin America. As a friend once told me, there are only two days that matter in your life: the day you were born and the day you understand why.

Lessons Learned from American Dreaming

What are the lessons I learned from my American Dream story? First, that nothing happens overnight. This story is already 45 years in the making, and I hope it lasts at least another 45 years more.

Never stop dreaming. Never let anyone, including your own family, tell you that you have enough. Your job is to dream and help all those behind you accomplish their own American Dreams. We have all the qualities of great entrepreneurs: We left everything behind and have almost nothing to risk—except the risk of not giving our dreams the shot they deserve.

Think like an owner, become an owner. Don’t be afraid of rejection; ignore the inner voice that tells you you’re not good enough or look or speak like the rest. Sometimes, those that look like you—those that are closest to you even—could be the ones holding you back the most. 

Learn to find the true dreamers, not the ones who talk—the ones that do. Once you find them, don’t be afraid to ask them for help.

Don’t be too arrogant. The truth is that we don’t know the game and our job is simply to accept that we too can learn. The numbers are in our favor—more are added each day that are willing to help—but it’s still a numbers game.

Don’t give up. The more of us that are encouraged to try to become an owner, a builder, an entrepreneur, and a leader, the easier it will be for Latinos to realize it’s normal.

I still appreciate something being hard every day, because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t appreciate the journey after all. Adelante!