Today’s Investment News — Drift: Power to the American Dream
By Izhar Armony
Elias Torres immigrated from Nicaragua, lived on food stamps and worked at McDonald’s. David Cancel was born in Queens to Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian parents. He didn’t speak English until he was five. Together they founded fast growing SaaS startup Drift. Drift helps companies engage in real-time, personalized conversations with the right customers at the right time.
I invited David for lunch a couple of years after he and Elias sold their prior company, Performable, to Hubspot where David was chief product officer and Elias the VP of Engineering. Once I heard they were ready to jump right back and start a new company, I wrote David a $10M check on the spot. Initially David didn’t want to take the check, not knowing what exactly they will be working on, but after I threatened to leave the check instead to the servers as a tip, David reluctantly took it, and the next day the three of us agreed on terms to fund Driftt (not a spelling mistake, the actual original name).
Why would I throw a large amount of institutional investors’ money behind an unformed product idea with no traction and zero metrics?
The answer is simple, because I had gotten to know the founders deeply over several years. During that time I grew to admire their tenacity, drive, product sensitivities, intentional experimentation and also their strong values. Great entrepreneurs come from all backgrounds, but there is something about being an immigrant or a first generation American that gives entrepreneurial stories an extra kick. What I saw in David and Elias back then is the same thing that I see in this dynamic duo now, a need to become successful against odds and to build without built in support systems. I wanted to back David and Elias as people first, believing then, as I know for certain now, that the idea and the technology would come later and that with time a strong company would indeed be formed around them.
It took about two years of iterating on ideas and launching various minimum viable products (MVPs). Each of them was quickly killed by the co-founders because they were “good, but not great.” Over those years David and Elias retained tremendous strength and commitment to build something really amazing. It was worth the wait because eventually they unveiled Drift’s current incarnation as a revenue acceleration platform. It took another four years to assemble all the right players on their amazing team and to secure the support of other investors who believed (shouts out to General Catalyst and Sequoia), for us to complete Drift’s first chapter as a crazy fast growing startup that set an ambitious goal to change the way businesses buy from businesses.
Today Drift is ready to step into its second chapter of maturation. As part of “growing up” we are proud to welcome Vista Equity Partners as Drift’s new investor. Vista brings proven capabilities of helping startups mature and grow in efficient and scalable ways. So that they can go on to become strong publicly traded companies that last.
Here at CRV we are excited to stay beside Drift for this, its next chapter. We look forward to seeing the many hundreds of Drift employees, and among them those two very special first generation Americans we invested in back in 2014, continue to build and achieve their American dreams. If you’re an entrepreneur who is in the early stages of dreaming big, no matter what country you hail from, we’d love for you to reach out and get to know Team CRV.
