Chief Product Officer @Klaviyo — previously built @Agency, @Drift, @HubSpot, and @Performable. Invested in @Klaviyo, @Finix, @PostScriptIO, and dozens more.
Boston, MA 🇺🇸
Joined March 2008
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Elias Torres retweeted
Self Improving Companies
A customer buying a car doesn’t care which team handles sales, financing or support. They want a great experience with someone who knows them personally and has the full picture.
I’ve seen customer lifetime value increase when one agent owns that relationship. Let agents learn from the work, test improvements and share what works, and the company gets better as it operates.
Selling this to an incumbent means asking people to change their systems and often their own jobs.
A founder starting today can build around the customer from day one. At the speed AI is moving, it may be better to build the AI native bank, insurer or marketplace yourself.
If you’re building this, let’s talk.
cc @a16z @speedrun
Elias Torres retweeted
Wabi 2.0 is live!
personal agents are one person, one chat. but the parts of life that matter run on more than one person
Wabi is an agent you use together. you talk to it, it does stuff, builds the apps you need, and anyone can join the thread - your partner, your best friend, the preschool moms groupchat
school changes pickup time → Wabi updates the family calendar, everyone sees it.
a show you’d both love → Wabi finds a night that works, gets the tickets.
the trip everyone keeps talking about → Wabi picks the dates, builds the itinerary, books it
go start a thread with your people 👇
🤖 Made with AI
Elias Torres retweeted
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) says the old work week is officially dead:
“You would think, ‘AI has arrived, & we're all working 2 hours a week.’”
“The opposite is happening. I get text messages at midnight from the CEOs and CTOs of these companies.”
“It’s more like 7/7/7: 7 days a week from 7 AM to 7 PM.”
BREAKING: 60% of Vercel deployments are now driven by AI agents, up from 3% in Jan 2026.
FULL INTERVIEW
Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg), Founder & CEO @Vercel
Stats:
› 80% of AI Gateway token volume comes from open models
› 10 years to reach 1B deployments, then another 1.5B in just 10 months
"The machines have taken over."
I sat down with G at Vercel's SF HQ to discuss how AI is changing software development, infrastructure & the economics of SaaS.
Vercel has reportedly reached $600M in annualized revenue, up 148% YoY, with 485K+ paying teams and a $9.3B valuation. Customers include SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta, Stripe, Brex, Shopify, DoorDash, & Polymarket.
P.S. Guillermo mentions "code" 145 times throughout our conversation. His thesis is that AI agents are making code effectively free, fundamentally changing what companies build versus buy.
"You buy Vercel as the platform, & then you never have to buy software again because you can just generate it to your needs."
We cover:
› The shift from human-facing websites to agent-native interfaces, MCP & agentic commerce with Stripe, Shopify & DoorDash
› Why free code changes SaaS economics for Salesforce & SAP, software development & the role of engineers at Meta, SpaceX & Mercedes F1
› Open vs. closed models, including why ~80% of token volume on Vercel’s AI Gateway now goes to open models like Moonshot’s Kimi & DeepSeek
› Unpacking frontier: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini & xAI
› Agent autonomy, prompt injection, sandboxing & enterprise security after OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach
› Model routing, growing compute demand & the future of serverless infrastructure
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Guillermo Rauch, Founder & CEO at Vercel
(03:32) The simplest advice for going viral
(07:24) How Vercel became the index of AI
(11:34) The CEO who still ships code on weekends
(14:34) Robots writing code for robots
(17:57) The web's next users aren't human
(21:15) Is ChatGPT reading your website right now?
(24:21) Minority Report is becoming real software
(29:16) The end of SaaS & the rise of personal software
(34:07) AI agents are soldiers with no frontal lobe
(45:42) AI hackers & the coming cyber war
(47:55) The $1M challenge to hack Vercel's sandbox
(52:10) 80% of tokens now go to open models
(59:00) The biggest risk for frontier labs
(1:04:00) Can AI labs survive the public markets?
(1:06:28) Why AI has Silicon Valley working 7-7-7
(1:07:23) "The thing you fell in love with is gone"
(1:16:56) Your vibe-coded demo won't get you hired
(1:22:22) The hardest part of running a company is keeping it simple
(1:27:01) Why no company can run all its AI apps 24/7
Elias Torres retweeted
Today we shipped a new way of building data connectors and integrations for @klaviyo. It now takes us minutes (and our agent a few hours) to build integrations that run on our infra — so scale, reliability out of the box.
Let us know integrations you’ve been looking for!
Elias Torres retweeted
Two things matter most when hiring executives or promoting leaders internally:
1. Can they hire exceptional people?
2. Can they solve hard problems?
External executives are usually experienced at building teams, but often lack the context and content depth to solve the hardest problems themselves.
Internal leaders usually get promoted because they’re exceptional problem solvers. The question is whether they can become exceptional at hiring.
The best leaders can do both.
Elias Torres retweeted
on top of this @amazon is our investor… and we’re still getting nothing but “we’ve escalated your request” from their support team when our production environment is down @awscloud @AWS @AWSSupport
AWS suspended our account by mistake and with no explanation and Wabi has been completely down for over 3 hours
we've sent every document and talked to support, but they can only open a ticket from the account they suspended, which we can't get into. I guess Amazon really doesn’t like personal agents :)
genuinely Kafkaesque. @AWSSupport @awscloud - please help, my dms are open
Elias Torres retweeted
We want more people creating and building. So many entrepreneurs and small businesses will start and grow their businesses with Muse.
So all of @klaviyo’s platform is available today in Muse. Let’s build!
Starting today, Klaviyo is a partner for Muse for Small Business, a new AI product from Meta. If you're a small business owner wearing every hat, connect your Klaviyo account and let Muse find who's gone quiet and draft the win-back email. Learn more: klaviyo.com/blog/klaviyo-met…
Elias Torres retweeted
2/ here's the full list of connectors launching today
@Zoom
@figma
@canva
@stripe (merchant)
@github
@Meta Business Manager (Ads, FB Pages, IG Biz/Creator)
@QuickBooks
@SlackHQ
@gohighlevel
@todoist
@Outlook
@Box
@Dropbox
@klaviyo
@Shopify (merchant)
@linear
@asana
@zapier
@evernote
@Lovable
@Replit
@vercel
have a connector you want to submit? go to muse.ai/platform
Elias Torres retweeted
We're helping world-class organizations like @klaviyo build agentic deployment platforms.
① Connect every agent (claude, codex, cursor…)
② Configure SSO via their IDP (Okta, Entra)
③ Now everyone can cook, securely®
What happens to SaaS once every company sets this up? I get this question a lot 😁
First, the data must come from somewhere. These apps only work if they can be infused with business data.
This is why we see the big enterprise SaaS players suddenly prioritize shipping CLIs and MCPs. Or dust off APIs they were neglecting for years.
The new 'procurement bar' will be how ergonomic your product is for *agents*, rather than humans. How easily they can navigate your ontology and work with your data.
Once that's in place, there's a long tail of SaaS applications that I suspect will never be bought again. They'll be generated. They'll be more secure, more performant, more modern, and tailored to each company's and employee's needs.
Engineers @klaviyo built an internal app platform on Vercel. In the first two weeks, 512 employees shipped 356 projects.
• Idea to live app in 3 minutes
• Apps are full-stack, on Klaviyo's databases
• Deployments are SSO-gated & private by default
vercel.com/customers/how-kla…
Elias Torres retweeted
Software was the first wave of AI. The physical world is next.
It's rare to see an AI company land its first four customers: all Fortune 500. @Magentic did.
The team wrote their first line of code at the @sequoia office. Welcome @felicis, and congrats Robin and Odhran on the $18M Series A 🚀
More below 👇
Elias Torres retweeted
Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow.
—Professor Richard Feynman
Elias Torres retweeted
Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit
— Nat Friedman
Elias Torres retweeted
It was a website in the 90s/00s; it's a commerce agent in 2026.
Every business will have one (and this time with personalization out of the box). Excited to be doing this with @AnthropicAI, can build and ship a Customer Agent with commerce on @klaviyo today.
Elias Torres retweeted
.@naval on why you need to play in decades:
"Looking back on my career, the people who I identified as brilliant and hardworking two decades ago are all successful now, almost without exception. On a long enough timescale, you will get paid."
Elias Torres retweeted
The next couple of years are among the most important in history.
The economy is transforming an order of magnitude faster than ever before.
If you have the opportunity to work obsessively on an important mission and choose not to, you may regret it for the rest of your life.
Elias Torres retweeted
Puentes applications are open.
20 fellows from our first three cohorts already live in SF. They've become close friends and work at companies like @cognition, @vercel, @krea_ai.
Watch what our program is about directly from them.
Apply until September 10.
Elias Torres retweeted
Elias Torres and I go back more than two decades to our days at IBM, where we worked together on the cutting-edge WebAhead team. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of watching @eliast build multiple exceptional companies, including Drift, which was acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.2 billion.
When Elias began exploring what to build next, we spent countless hours experimenting with the new generation of AI tools. Those explorations ultimately became @agency, and @arrayvc was proud to be one of the company’s earliest commitments.
It’s incredibly rewarding to see this come full circle for Elias and the entire Agency team. I also love how this story mirrors our history; Elias now gets to build alongside his longtime friend, @abialecki, CEO of @klaviyo. At the end of the day, this business is built on relationships. The best partnerships often span decades blurring lines between business and friendships.
Congratulations to Elias and the entire Agency team. We’re excited to see what comes next!
The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.
spr.ly/6011B1Bn8x
Elias Torres retweeted
Big day for @eliast and the @agency team! @klaviyo has reached an agreement to acquire Agency, including their truly transformative technology and exceptional team.
More from @timt on why we invested in Agency's Series A, and how we saw they were defining what the future of customer relationships looked like from the start: menlovc.com/perspective/inve…
The serial entrepreneur joins the e-commerce company as CPO to lead its AI agents.
spr.ly/6011B1Bn8x
Elias Torres retweeted
.@eliast, founder of @agency , on what he did after a $1.2 billion exit:
He is an immigrant. He has worked nonstop his entire life. And for the first time ever, someone told him to slow down.
"I just learned to be no one. To be nobody."
No title. No fund. No company. When people asked what he did, his answer was nothing.
"To be asked by people, who are you, what do you do, and I'm like, I'm doing nothing. It was a humbling experience."
He had to detach from the company, bring closure to it, spend time doing nothing, accept that, and then figure out what the next step was.
That was the work.
NEW: He sold Drift for $1.2 billion. Now, he's building to $1B in revenue with fewer than 100 people.
@eliast (Co-Founder & CEO of @agency) joins GTMnow.
He calls his $1.2B Drift exit his "biggest failure." And the lesson behind it is now the whole reason he's building again.
Companies already spend $6 on people for every $1 on software, yet even a 200-person team like Drift's touched only 4–5% of customers. The budget's there, but the coverage isn't.
Now, his new company Agency deploys AI agents that run a company's entire customer organization, proactively caring for and retaining every customer, not just the 5% a human team can reach.
Oh and they don't have titles at Agency!
They ditched titles on purpose because past 100 people at Drift, Elias got buried in meetings about levels and reporting, so at Agency everyone stays hands-on with customers and no one can say "that's not my job."
Highlights:
00:37 Why a $1.2B exit is his "biggest failure"
07:30 What Agency is: the post-sales customer organization
11:59 Make investors earn it before the check
18:22 Building a $1B company with under 100 people
22:50 "Sales is the last role we eliminate"
29:00 Everyone's a forward-deployed engineer, no titles
39:08 Hiring for hunger, not credentials
43:04 "Agents don't really exist yet"
45:34 Why humans are the real bottleneck to AI