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HubSpot's Chief Product Officer walks out the door.
He's going to build something that competes with HubSpot. His first move: delete every marketing form on Drift's website. Replace them all with a chatbot. The marketing director thinks he's lost his mind. 40,000 businesses sign up without a single form.
That's the story of David Cancel. Five companies. Four exits. One category he invented out of thin air — and then watched get taken from him by the private equity firm that wrote his unicorn check.
David Cancel grew up in the Bronx, the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He spoke only Spanish until kindergarten. Learned English by watching Bugs Bunny cartoons. At age seven, his family moved to Forest Hills, Queens — a predominantly white and Jewish neighborhood. He felt he didn't belong anywhere.
He never finished college. Dropped out of Queens College (CUNY) senior year, bored, obsessed with the early commercial internet. His first startup job was in 1995. That restlessness never left.
Cancel didn't found one company. He founded five before the age most founders are still at their first:
Every company had one thing in common: Cancel sold before most founders would even consider it. His rule: leave while you're still learning. The moment the learning stops, the clock is ticking.
When HubSpot acquired Performable, Cancel became HubSpot's Chief Product Officer. He brought with him co-founder Elias Torres. Together they rebuilt the entire HubSpot product from scratch — replacing the core with technology they'd built — and scaled the engineering team from 20 to 100 people.
He was good at it. Too good, perhaps.
When HubSpot went public in October 2014, the bankers told Cancel he couldn't leave. Standard post-IPO lockup expectations. The moment someone told David Cancel he couldn't do something, it became the only thing he wanted to do.
He left.
His stated reason: "I felt like I had learned enough, and that my work was done." His real reason, told in other interviews: he didn't want the life of being a public company executive. He felt trapped. The same feeling he'd had every time he'd stayed somewhere too long.
Elias Torres is the most underrated figure in the Drift story.
Torres came to the United States from Nicaragua at 17, speaking no English. He enrolled at Leto High School in Tampa, then the University of South Florida through the Latino Scholarship Program. He later studied at Harvard. Before startups, he spent 10 years as a software engineer at IBM — watching friends leave for Google and Facebook, terrified he'd miss the next wave.
He left IBM to join Lookery (10 employees, no revenue). Lookery failed in the 2008 recession. Then Performable, where he became VP of Engineering and met Cancel.
When Cancel was drifting after HubSpot (pun intended by nobody), Torres pushed him to start another company. Cancel didn't want to. Torres wouldn't let it go.
Drift was co-founded in 2014-2015, and from the beginning Torres was the one Cancel described as the recruiter, the extrovert, the person who could walk into a room and make people want to work there. Cancel was the product mind. Torres was the human engine.
They were, by their own account, two Hispanic founders in an industry where that represented less than 1% of unicorn founders. They were aware of that. It shaped how they built the company — a commitment to 50% women in sales, intentional diversity hiring, and an ethos of building something that outlasted them.
In 2014, Cancel was watching the Mary Meeker Internet Trends report. One chart stopped him cold: the explosive growth of messaging platforms — WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat, Line. What had once been a niche behavior (geeks chatting) had become the dominant communication pattern for everyone on the planet.
His observation: messaging had gone from being how developers talked to how everyone talked. And yet B2B websites were still forcing people through the same funnel invented in 1999 — fill out a form, wait three days for a sales rep to call, get nurtured by an email sequence nobody wanted.
Cancel's thesis: what if the buying experience at a B2B company felt like messaging someone you knew, not filing a support ticket?
When Drift launched, "conversational marketing" wasn't a term. There was live chat (support tool). There were chatbots (gimmicks). There was inbound marketing (HubSpot's category).
Cancel and Torres knew from watching HubSpot that naming a category was as powerful as building a product. HubSpot had taken the concept of permission-based marketing and called it "inbound." They owned the term, owned the SEO, owned the conference. Drift needed to do the same thing.
The early terminology was "conversation-driven marketing." Clunky. Their head of marketing, Dave Gerhardt — who would become one of the most influential marketing voices in B2B — simplified it: "conversational marketing."
The strategy was deliberate:
- Publish content using the term relentlessly
- Capture customer quotes using the language
- Create the definitive guide on the topic
- Wait for customers to start using the term organically
When customers began writing "conversational marketing" in their own emails without prompting, they knew they'd won. Gerhardt later described the naming strategy: "If you don't name something, then it doesn't become real."
It was HubSpot's inbound marketing playbook, aimed directly at HubSpot.
In 2016, David Cancel called Dave Gerhardt.
"I think we should get rid of all of our forms."
Gerhardt — whose entire growth model was built on those forms — thought the CEO had lost his mind. Forms were the conversion engine. Forms were how you captured leads. Forms were how B2B had worked for twenty years.
Cancel's argument was simple: the form experience was broken from the buyer's perspective. You fill out a form. You wait. Someone calls you three days later. You've already moved on. The company optimized for its own workflow, not for the buyer's experience.
Drift pulled every lead capture form off its website. Every gated content download. Every "request a demo" form. Replaced them all with chatbots.
The results: 40,000 businesses signed up to Drift without a single lead form. The 15% increase in leads was a footnote to a more important truth — they had just made themselves the living proof of concept for their own product.
It was the most effective piece of category marketing in B2B SaaS history. Drift didn't just talk about conversational marketing. They were the demonstration.
Drift published a "Marketing Manifesto" on SlideShare that spread through B2B marketing circles like a brush fire. The core argument: modern marketing had become adversarial — treating prospects as leads to capture rather than people to help. Forms existed for the company's benefit, not the buyer's.
The manifesto outlined a new philosophy: be remarkable, communicate authentically, avoid jargon, foster trust, treat people like people. It wasn't sophisticated theory. It was a direct provocation to the entire demand generation industrial complex.
It kept going viral for years. Marketing teams cited it in internal strategy documents. It became required reading at B2B growth conferences.
The irony: the company that built content marketing tools had a CPO who hated content marketing in its current form. Cancel wasn't anti-marketing. He was anti-friction. Every form, every email nurture, every gated asset was friction between a buyer and a salesperson who wanted to help them.
From 2015 to 2021, Drift's trajectory was exceptional:
- $32M Series C led by Sequoia Capital in 2017
- $60M in additional funding in 2018 (Sequoia again)
- $107M total disclosed venture funding
- 70% ARR growth in 2020 versus prior year
- $100M revenue by 2021
- $135M ARR by 2022
Cancel stepped back from CEO to Executive Chairman in 2022, replaced by Scott Ernst. By then the company had over 5,000 customers including Gong, Okta, Zenefits, Outreach, and Pluralsight.
In September 2021, Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in Drift, pushing the valuation over $1 billion. Cancel and Torres had done it — a billion-dollar company, two Hispanic founders, built from a contrarian bet that B2B companies should talk to their customers like human beings.
Vista's playbook was different from Sequoia's.
The first move: push Drift dramatically upmarket. The entry-level $40/month tier was killed. Minimum pricing jumped to $2,500/month — $30,000 per year before you had access to most meaningful features. Enterprise customers were routinely paying $80,000–$150,000 annually. The SMB customers who had evangelized Drift's product, who had spread conversational marketing as a concept, who had built the category's early adoption — were priced out.
The second consequence: the pricing opacity became a customer service crisis. Drift stopped publishing prices entirely. Every inquiry required "contact sales." Critical reviews across G2 and Trustpilot documented the same complaint in 72% of cases: "expensive," "overpriced for what you get," "impossible to trial before committing $30K." After the Salesloft acquisition, renewal prices went up 40% for existing customers.
Vista had acquired Drift at an estimated 17x revenue multiple in 2021 — a peak SaaS market valuation.
The SaaS market crashed in 2022. Revenue multiples contracted from 17-23x to 4-7x across the industry. A $135M ARR business at 2022 multiples was worth roughly $540M-$945M, down from the $1B+ unicorn mark. That's the math Vista was staring at.
Meanwhile:
- Drift laid off 159 employees in 2023 (approximately 30% of headcount)
- Employee growth regressed by 20% over two years
- The market Drift had created now had over 160 competitors according to G2
- Conversational marketing had become a commodity category
The irony: Drift invented the category so clearly that every competitor could copy-paste their positioning. Category creation creates a market. It doesn't guarantee you keep it.
On February 13, 2024, Salesloft announced the acquisition of Drift.
Except "acquisition" is generous framing. Both companies were Vista Equity portfolio companies. Vista had bought Salesloft at 23x revenue in 2022 ($2.3 billion valuation) and Drift at 17x revenue in 2021 ($1 billion valuation). Both were now worth significantly less on paper. Combining them was less a strategic vision than a balance sheet necessity — cutting redundant costs, justifying overlapping valuations, telling LPs a story about synergies.
The combined entity serves approximately 6,000 customers across the U.S., UK, Poland, South Africa, and Mexico. In August-September 2025, a major security breach exposed customer data across hundreds of organizations, adding reputational damage to the financial challenges.
Elias Torres had already seen it coming. After the Vista deal, he left to consult for OpenAI, then in late 2024 launched Agency — an AI for customer success managers, backed by Sequoia and HubSpot Ventures in a $12M seed round. Torres was quoted on his Drift years: "I've lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the decisions I've made" — but the decision he was clearly making now was to build something new rather than fight through a private equity integration.
Cancel remains Executive Chairman, title intact, category created, chapter closed.
1. David Cancel learned English from Bugs Bunny.
The CPO who overhauled HubSpot's product roadmap, and the founder who invented an entire B2B marketing category, grew up in the Bronx speaking only Spanish. His English-language education was a cartoon rabbit. He dropped out of college senior year because he was too bored. The tech industry's preferred narrative is Stanford → Y Combinator → unicorn. Cancel's was: immigrant kid, Bugs Bunny, dropout, WPP acquisition, Sequoia, unicorn.
2. Cancel was a five-time founder before Drift — and most people only know Performable.
Compete.com was sold to WPP for $150 million. Ghostery — the privacy tool — was his. Lookery failed. Four exits before Drift. The pattern wasn't genius; it was a relentless philosophy: stay until you stop learning, then leave.
3. Elias Torres originally joined Lookery, which failed in the 2008 recession.
The co-founder who pushed Cancel to start Drift had already survived a startup failure together. Their partnership was forged in a company that died. That shared experience — building together, losing together — was the foundation for Drift. Co-founders who've failed together before success are rare. Cancel and Torres had that.
4. The "form-killing" decision happened because Cancel called his marketing director and said four words: "Get rid of all forms."
No committee. No A/B testing. No strategic retreat. A phone call. Dave Gerhardt, the marketing director, was shocked — forms were the central nervous system of demand gen. Cancel's reasoning was purely experiential: the form experience, as a buyer, was broken. He knew because he'd been a buyer. 40,000 companies signed up without a single form.
5. "Conversational marketing" was almost "conversation-driven marketing."
The category Drift owned was one word away from never catching on. The original internal terminology was "conversation-driven marketing" — accurate but clunky. Dave Gerhardt simplified it. If you don't name something it doesn't become real; if you name it badly, someone else names it better. The compression of three words to two was the difference between a category and a description.
Sources: Mark MacLeod interview with David Cancel | Sequoia Capital David Cancel Spotlight | Sacra Drift financial data | Warmly.ai Salesloft acquisition analysis | LeadGenius acquisition analysis | AdvanceB2B Dave Gerhardt podcast | Leadfeeder conversational marketing history | TechCrunch Vista Equity acquisition | St Pete Catalyst Elias Torres profile | Salesflare David Cancel interview
