The Revenue You Don’t Know You’re Losing — Fireside Chat with Elias Torres & Kate Smith

Julia Nimchinski:
Welcome to Day 2 of the Agentic OS Summit. We’re talking AI and network effects, vibe coding, digital twins, customer loops, and so much more. We have an all-star cast today of world’s top, B2B world’s top, operators, AI-native founders, VCs, and analysts, and What a treat! Elias Torres, founder of Agency, co-founder of Drift, and Kate Smith, who heads up GTM at Agency AI.
What a way to start the day. Pleasure to host you here. Welcome, how are you? And, what’s in your agenda, Goet?

Kate Smith:
We are so excited! Thanks for having us!

Julia Nimchinski:
That question always frustrates everyone, but what I mean is, what do you use for… in terms of a Gentec tech stacks? Ali is super curious to find out.

Elias Torres:
Agency, obviously. Agency. Yeah, no, definitely, agency’s my go-to, but no, I think that we are… We keep building on top of the agentic harnesses that, you know, Claude, we’re a big Clod shop at the agency, and, we’ve been building our own tooling from scratch for… to build all the coding, right, for example. So most of the coding is being done automatically now by Iona Horizons.
Similar to how RAMP builds their code, we did the same thing, and then we have found it amazingly productive.

Julia Nimchinski:
Super cool. Let’s dive into it. Kate, back to you. Take it away.

Kate Smith:
Awesome. Thanks for having us again. So Elias, I mean, you’ve built companies in the go-to-market space, you’ve had quite an illustrious career, you could probably go sail off into the sunset. Why are you doing this? Why are you building another company and in customer management?

Elias Torres:
Selling into the sunset. Yeah, no, we’ll probably all be there, going there soon. I don’t know. I think in the meantime, what, what really, Keeps me attached, it keeps me on the ground, is that… I believe that customer management is one of the biggest weaknesses in companies today. I think that we all can build products, we can market it, we can fundraise.
But when it comes to that post-sales moment, when we have to manage that customer, and especially when the number of customers grow, is one of the least known aspects of business building today.
And I think that that’s an area that I see a lot of noise, but very, very few products exist today that can actually manage your customers really well, and much worse, like, you know, how many customers are there with AI that manages the customers? So this problem has not been solved, and as an engineer, as an entrepreneur, it just… You know, makes me want to get up every day and tackle it.
I, you know, AGI might build everything soon in the future, whatever, whatnot, but the reality is that it hasn’t been solved, and every customer, every company needs this. So, it’s really exciting to work with this, because everywhere we go, everywhere you and I talk to customers, they have the same problem, and they want help. So, it’s exciting.

Kate Smith:
Yep, I love that, and I’m certainly glad you’re doing it. So what’s actually changed with AI? What’s your perspective on that?

Elias Torres:
I think… I think everything has changed with AI, like, absolutely everything. I mean, we live in a bubble in tech, and we’re, like, you know, sometimes, I was in a safari in South Africa, and… A lot of people there don’t care about AI. It’s like, let’s protect this rhino, let’s do something else.
But we’re in a bubble here, and we believe, I see, I feel like everything, absolutely everything has changed. And then when you look at the other side of the coin, even in tech, the reality is that nothing has changed. You know, it’s like… And what do I mean by that?
I mean that… on a day-to-day basis, besides typing and copying and pasting something into ChatGPT, we’re not really interacting with AI in the way that we dream of, right? It’s like, we’re still doing the things… people still maintaining spreadsheets, people still entering data into their CRM, it’s like, people, you know, are… if you look at your day, and you see how many things you’re doing.
Almost everything that you’re doing today, by hand, everything that you’re typing, everything that you are, like, sending, writing, drafting. something that we shouldn’t be doing if everything has changed, right? And so I think that we still got ways to go, but it’s mostly because us, we push back and don’t want to change.

Kate Smith:
Yeah, and take us inside a typical CS leadership meeting, right? Because for many teams, this is still the reality today. What do we see actually happening in that room? You’ve been there before, what do we see happening?

Elias Torres:
Yeah, I’ll tell you where I’ve been, right? It’s like… and I hope, I get this right, but the reality is that you know, I just got off the phone with the customer, CEO of a company, of a business, and it says that, you know, CEOs call it, it’s a shitshow, right?
It’s like, you go into a meeting, you go into a board meeting, we have things like the SaaS apocalypse, right, happening right now, and everybody’s struggling. churn is through the roof, more than the last time I was in a board meeting dealing with churn, which was around 2022, and so… now it’s even, you know, exponentially increased. And so what happens when you go into those meetings, right?
First of all, I think that the job of a CS leader was really impossible before. I cannot imagine what it’s now, right? So it’s, you know, so it’s twice as hard, 10 times as hard, but you go into that meeting. And then the reality is that all you’re bringing is… you know, backward-looking data, right? You’re like, okay, let me see. This is… these are the customers that churn.
That’s the main thing you bring to the table, and this is the number. And you dread to say that number, and it’s not really your fault, right? It’s really a fault of the collective company, because customer success is not just one individual’s responsibility. But you go in there and you’re like, oh, these are the customers that churn. And there is nothing else after that.
there might be some stats, some breakdown, and people are like, okay, slice it by this, sliced it by that, but the age-old question, everybody wants to figure out, why are people churning? And we never seem to give the answers. And so usually that’s what happens.
It’s just a fight of, like, who did what, why did we drop the ball, we just review, and we look backwards, instead of looking forward, right? It’s like, there is no… no, enough information that people are looking and saying, what’s going to happen the following quarter, and the quarter, and the quarter after that?
At best, we have inside our pocket, we know which customers said already they’re going to churn next quarter. But we’re still dealing with that, and we have no ability to forecast, we have no ability to tell, or to see the… or to see exactly the lay of the land and what’s happening, right? Wouldn’t it be great if you had a report that said.
which are the customers that you… that stop using the product? Which are the customers that already said and they’re pissed off in their calls? Who are the customers that we have not contacted? Who are the customers that we promised something and we didn’t do it? We completely forgotten. Why don’t we come in with that data, right? And so I think that the leadership meetings, it’s a shitshow.
That’s really… and I think people struggle, no one didn’t want to be part of those, and so we need to figure out how to… how to change those to be a great place for us to discuss possibilities and action plans for the future, like, and really change the trajectory of our companies.

Kate Smith:
100%. And why not just hire more people? Why can’t you hire your way out of the problem?

Elias Torres:
I was… second call of the morning today, I was talking to another CEO, And he says the team always come to him and says, we need more people. We need more people, and I think that… when I started the agency, I said… I had said, I promise on LinkedIn, I said, I’m only gonna hire 100 people. That’s… that’s max.
One is because, you know, at Drift, we had, like, you know, over 600, 800, and that was a lot of… a lot of pain. I think it was a really difficult job, not one that I’m really fond of, so I said 100. We’re around 25 right now, and I love this number. And the reality is that We could hire more people, we have funding, we raise money, and so forth.
But I think that we… I first would like to lay the, lay the law down and say, until I see what we’re automating and what one individual can do, and you can see that in code today, right? An engineer now can code 10 times more than engineers could before. You know, most companies are shipping a PR a day. Now we’re shipping 20 PRs a day per employee, right, per engineer.
And so the same thing happens with this, it’s like. Can we hire more people? You can, but it’s not going to solve the problem. Because the amount of work that needs to be done per customer, if you’re doing it manually. it’s not gonna get solved, right?
It’s like, we have customers telling us that given the number of customers they have, and the staff they have in place, they might only see them once… they might only be able to talk to them once every three and a half years. So that’s one touch per three and a half years, given the long tail of the business that they have, and every customer matters.
So, we know that it’s not going to be adding more people. It’s going to be… we can only add more people when we have really transformed the company into leverage an AI that does the work.
when AI does work for you, where we can trade and have the machine, you know, follow a 50-step checklist before every meeting with every customer, we’re not going to be able to add more people to the problem… to the solution.

Kate Smith:
Yeah, it’s fascinating. And you know, you’ve been pretty blunt that existing software has in a lot of ways, made things worse than better. I mean, there’s more options out there than ever, but companies are still facing churn, renewals are getting lost, there’s a lack of visibility into what’s going on with customers. Why is that? Can you walk us through, like, why that actually happens?

Elias Torres:
you know, I built the HubSpot platform, right? So I have… I’m guilty. I built Drift, I’m guilty. I think that most software that you… that exists today is absolute garbage. That’s just my honest opinion, and I built a lot of it, right? I think that… when you build a software that doesn’t do anything for me, and it just demands for me to do things for it, right? It’s just silly now, right?
It’s like, for example, I don’t… you know, when we use agency, we don’t enter any information into the system. How much time do you spend entering information into agency? Zero. Zero, right? We don’t… we don’t… it’s like, it is a thing of the past. We don’t tell our reps, did you update your account? No.
I can go see, after a call finished everything that went on in that call and what I need to do. I can monitor for… for red flags and for issues, right? And so, the old software doesn’t work that way. Just, it demands an operator. It makes you enter information, and what gives you is just simply not intelligent. It doesn’t give it to you at the right time.
And so that’s, like, phase one of AI software, I think. It’s, like, software that avoids you doing any work and saves you time. But we’re still not there yet in terms of society and all the startups in the world we have. No company yet. does the work of managing the customer, right? And so, I think that most software before, it’s just useless.
I mean, we just keep track of, okay, what do we have in there? Like, renewal date for a customer? it logs all the emails, it logs all the meetings, but what does it do for you? I just think it’s garbage. Paying for software that does nothing is such a waste of time, and people are like, but it’s my system of record? And I’m like. who cares? All the emails are in your Gmail.
the contracts are there, what info… you know, it’s not really difficult information to keep, so that’s why I think most software that exists today is shit, especially in the go-to-market stack. It doesn’t really do anything.

Kate Smith:
And what do you feel like the real system of record is, right? Instead of just, like, being the CRM, I think is the traditional one, what’s your system of record, and…

Elias Torres:
I mean, you know, my system of record is that is really where the data is. You want to really go to the true source. A lot of the data lives in emails, right? If you have contracts. If you have PLG software, it’s in your database, in your business, right?
You have the credentials to the credit card, you have the, you know, the agreement, you have the… whatever the person says, start, what billing plan they chose, and so forth. That’s the system of record. It could be your database, it could be your email, and it could be your communication with the customer. So, it’s like, that’s the fact.
If what you want is a backup, okay, it could be Snowflake, you know? But ultimately, what’s more important is what’s reading your system of record. It’s like, what is making sense of it, what’s organizing it, and what’s actioning the data that is in it? That’s kind of like my view of what’s a system of record.

Kate Smith:
And what does having command over your revenue mean in practice?

Elias Torres:
I want to have command over my revenue. Well, there’s two things, right? I think that we are… We’re talking really more about… Post-sale revenue, right, I think it’s renewal. In the context of this conversation, there’s, there’s… having command over my revenue when it comes to the pre-sales, you know, top of the funnel, that’s a different… that’s a different conversation.
I’m talking more about here, I hope that’s what you mean, right, is that what happens post-sales? And I think, going back to that. that meeting earlier that we’re talking about, the leadership meeting with CS leaders and CROs, you know, being like, fuck, like, we just… the churn just went through the roof this quarter, and what are we gonna do?
Having command over the revenue would be… is to… is to have, first, visibility over your book of business, right? It’s, like, usually. people are, like, trying to create spreadsheets and say to every CSM, please update, sales rep, account manager. here are our top accounts that are renewing this quarter. Please tell us what’s going on. And that’s just so, so backwards and so basic, right?
Well, that’s something that an AI system should be able to just give you instantly. tell me what’s the summary going on with each account, what are the risks, right? What are the flags we need to wear, and what are the suggested actions that we can take on before we begin the quarter, before we begin the quarter, you know, that is coming after this quarter, right? And so.
Visibility really is, the number one requirement of having command over your revenue. If you don’t have visibility, what’s the point? Why are you even doing business? It’s amazing how people are just flying blind and think that that’s okay, or just rely on some RevOps person to be like, tell me what’s going on. And you should be able to know what’s going on directly, right?
And I think, once you have the visibility, then it’s pretty obvious, right? It’s like, one, you realize Oh, well, we are not touching the right customers that are renewing. We did not prepare ahead of time what, you know, what needed to be done with this customer.
And also, the thing that you need is the ability to execute, because once you have visibility, the… most of the stuff is pretty obvious. You’re not talking to the customer, right? You don’t… you’re not maintaining a relationship with the customer, because you’re busy firefighting and doing all the stuff that you shouldn’t be doing. You didn’t bring results to the customer. Right?
And, and you have no idea how the customer feels. And so, if you have visibility into, like, those four factors, then you’re gonna start just coming up with obvious things to do, right? Like, if you don’t… if you don’t have a relationship with a customer, then build one. the customer’s a million dollars, you should invest a lot. Go take them to dinner, go… go take him to whatever, right?
Go to a paint night with them. And if you… are not having to see an adoption, well, you need to spend time with the customer and say, why is it that they’re not, you know, adopting the product? And so, that’s the work that needs to be done. But if you don’t have visibility, you cannot do it.
And then the second thing is, in order to have command over your revenue, is that you have to have the ability to execute. If you see those things, and you have no resources to execute them. What most people think is always people. But what if we had AI that automated most of that? what if I had AI, Reaching out to my customers.
And AI kept track of when is the last time that me, as the CEO, had a touchpoint with that customer. And so we can say, I want it to be no more than 3 weeks. that I want to go without talking to a customer. And so, what if AI just teed up for me some email, some message.
that I can send to that customer, just to let them know that I’m watching their product, their usage, their adoption, that I’m investing in their relationship, that we should grab time to catch up, right? And so, if we had that, I could do a lot more. than what people do today, which is the CEO is too busy, and nobody surfaced that data to the CEO.
You know, and so, like, it’s, you know… and so, like, those are examples of, you have to have an ability to execute. And so, in this one, I would say those are the two things that I don’t know. The third one might just be profit, right?
But, find ways to leverage AI to execute and do more to take care of the customer, and then you will be more prepared, and you will have more command of that renewal when it comes, right?

Kate Smith:
Absolutely. And in the context of that, what does this mean for how CCOs should be thinking about building their teams moving forward?

Elias Torres:
Yeah, I mean, that’s, I think team building now is… I don’t know, I’m making some stuff up. I think. Things that are coming to my mind right now is that team building It’s no longer just about the team. but it’s about the AI and the agents, you know, it’s now, I wouldn’t say singularity, but it’s a composition, right? It’s like, what are you making the team up with, right?
it has to be the right type of humans and the right type of AI. In order to tackle the problem. Because if you think you’re gonna do… if I say, like, oh, just… if you had this type of humans, that’s all you need, I would be like, that would be fantastic. But that’s not necessarily the truth, right? The truth is that, we need the humans that can coexist with the right agents.
develop them, train them, monitor them, orchestrate them, whatever it takes, right? But, I feel like… We need the right people to start with, right? the people… a lot of people right now are, like, jumping and saying, like, oh, we need this, you know, AI natives. Like, okay, let’s get the AI natives. And who are the AI natives?
The people just graduating college, you know, early in their career, okay, that might be great. But do they have the emotional development, right, to talk to a customer? Do they have the experience? Do they know how a business operates, right? And so I think that, you know, we need AI natives.
I think that I was talking to a CEO this morning, and he was saying that, Some of his engineers are pushing back on adopting AI. Because of their craftsmanship and how well they pay attention to it. And AI might be going too fast, and so forth. And so we have some people that are… Skeptics that are pushing back. And I hate to say it, you don’t need the type of people right now in the teams.
It’s urgent, we’re running out of time, right? you know, businesses are dying because they’re losing too much customers. They’re not growing, and there’s no way to turn these companies around if we don’t take drastic measures, right? So I would say we want the AI natives in your team, but I also would want the AI converts.
those who are skeptics, but they can see the future, and have made the decision to switch, right? I think you and I were talking earlier in the morning, and you were saying that you do see a shift where people are, like.
being more open to AI now, like, and they’re jumping into the terminal, they’re jumping into cloud code, and they’re trying to figure that… it out, right, and how it could help them. So, that’s the kind of people that you want, so… but I would say, like, first of all, as a leader, you have to look at yourself. Where are you on that spectrum? Are you dooming? Are you native? Are you a convert?
Are you a skeptic? Because they will follow you if you know the way, right? And so, and it’s a really difficult time to know that, so it’s important to attend things like this, right? Where you’re talking to the people that are on the bleeding edge, that we’re learning, that we’re talking to all the CCOs, that we’re talking to the CROs.
And that we’re, you know, facing this problem head-on as I’m building this company, right? I think I’m… I had a… I’m a mentor in this program called Endeavor, and I was mentoring a CEO out of Brazil. And all he wanted to know is how we run the company. what kind of people? Well, you know, I said it’s mostly engineers and a few salespeople, right? And the rest, we just share all the work together.
And we leverage AI to the fullest, and so that’s kind of, like, the kind of team that you want. Remember when I said to you, we don’t build slides here at agency. We don’t… no, it’s like, everything has to be built automatically. Like, why on earth are we gonna be, like, arguing in the… like, you do not have time. to put a deck together for a customer, yet a customer wants it.
So, that’s the kind of leader you have to be. You have to be able to say, no, we’re gonna use, you know, leverage AI and do that kind of stuff. So I think it’s about putting a smarter team and partnering with the right software. that can actually help you achieve the work. Humans alone can’t do it.
It’s just, we just need to accept the fact that what we’re being asked to do is not possible for humans, or a thousand humans, or 10,000 humans to do. It’s just not possible.

Kate Smith:
Exactly, I love that, and I love thinking about things in terms of first principles, too, like, why are we doing these things? And you touched on it earlier, but, like, it is because everyone’s seeking that level of visibility, which is, you know, historically really hard to get, to get everyone on the same page.
So it’s something that, yeah, we do every day, is really question, like, you know, why are we doing this type of process, and can we do it better, and how do we leverage AI, so… I love that. And what should CCOs be asking themselves right now, in the context of everything that we talked about? What are some things they need to be thinking about?

Elias Torres:
I think that we… everybody should, take a deep breath. I think that, it’s, I think it’s difficult sometimes. You know, I talk… I love my job, right? It’s like, I don’t have to write emails, I don’t have to keep track of to-dos and tasks. I have agency, and so, like, I get to really just mostly spend time talking to the customers and to prospects, right?
And I think… you know, what another customer said this morning to me, it’s like, all I really want to do is figure out how to make as much money as possible to support my family, you know? And I think that that’s what we really need to be asking ourselves, is like, how are we going to provide for our loved ones? How are we going to provide for our children we have to come?
I think that… We need to take a deep breath. And really… don’t get distracted by the hype, because there’s just so much hype out there, right? Like, my own team says to me, Elias, get off Twitter. It’s like…

Kate Smith:
Cool.

Elias Torres:
Get off X. It’s like, it’s just funny, they’re like, we have a really young team on average, right? And we have a lot of AI natives, and they’re like, get off the social media. And so I would say to people, like, take a deep breath. No one has solved this. But he will be solved. Right? It’s something that it’s going to happen. I, as a technologist, as a founder, with a lot of experience.
I see where this is going, and this is blowing my mind, because I never thought that this was going to be possible. But really, everything’s gonna change. But nothing has changed. And so we need to understand, you know, what I would say is that CCOs, CROs, focus on… where… Your organization is at right now. it’s like, what is your team doing today, right? Is your team, how are they operating?
Are they being able to invest in the next, you know… are they able to invest in their learning and their growth to be able to scale and solve the business and evolve into what the new role will be? Because the role is not going to stay the same, so… I would say that, the other one is that the ultimate solution doesn’t exist yet.
No matter what any CEO tells you, it’s like… it’s just a whole bunch of bullshit, right? It’s like. the solutions are changing every single day, and they’re gonna be completely different in 6 months, and they’re gonna be completely different in 2 years. And most of what CEOs tell you, it’s not true yet. And so, you gotta be careful of how you’re gonna choose your partners.
I think that that’s the most important thing. Choose your partners correctly, of, like, tech, you know, vendors and innovation partners. And then the last one is, make sure that you are secure in budget. If you do not have budget. As a CEO, CCOs, ultimately, I see them, you know, delegating to, to the CEO, to the CFO, to the CRO, to other people.
and they really delegate that decision, they need to be able to make sure that they secure that, because without it, they’re not gonna have control over their destiny, and they’re gonna depend on the rest of the org. saddest thing is when I see a CCO wanting to buy something, and the IT department says, this is, we’ll build it here, you know?
And I think about it, when’s the last time the IT department built anything? Or, for that matter, that work? And so I think that your life, your family, your future depends on this. make the right decisions. If not, go somewhere else, you know what I mean? Go somewhere else where you can… when you can have agency, you know?

Kate Smith:
Love that. Always love hearing your perspective on these types of topics. Any, any closing remarks?

Elias Torres:
No, we have to… we have to make sure that we… we… we stay action-oriented here, right? I think it’s, we gotta get up every day, learn, and do something else. It’s not, like, how we feel, but it’s, like, what should we do today? Because there’s a lot of… there’s a lot of exciting things that are happening. I think that… it is positive, you know? I think it is positive.
why do we want to enter stupid shit into a CRM? You know, it’s like, we got better things to do with our time, and I think we need to go and discover that. What is really our purpose? What should we be doing? And one of them is how do we delight our customers? I think that that’s… it’s a fun thing to do. It gives me energy every time I do it.

Kate Smith:
For sure. Thank you, everyone, for spending time with us. If you want to chat more about this, you can always find us at agency.inc.

Julia Nimchinski:
Thank you so much, Elias. Thank you, Kate. And, what’s the best way to support you? You mentioned your website. Elias, should our community just reach out to you directly?

Elias Torres:
Yeah, absolutely. We are… I have all the time in the world. Reach out to me, you want to talk about these problems, you want to talk about how you turn your company around. I just think that… most companies don’t know how to manage customers, right? And they don’t know how to do it in the face of AI.
So I think that we’re on a journey, I’m just being honest and transparent, I don’t want to hype it up too much, but this is my mission, this is what I want to solve, this is what I’m learning, this is what I’m doing for my customers. Come and join us and be part of the community.

Julia Nimchinski:
Phenomenal. Thank you so much again.

Kate Smith:
Thank you.