'Working remotely' is such a buzzword term these days. But what does it really mean to build & work with a remote-first team? Alexander Torrenegra talks with Andres Cajiao and Erik Hare about his experience- how he was exposed to remote-first teams and how it evidently makes work more fulfilling.
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A big thank you to our post-production wizard, Vanesa Monroy.
[A moderately paced, trip hop song that is best described as chill and cruising. Synth and techno drums are the primary instruments in this track. This is our podcast background music, it starts playing at the very beginning]
Andres: 00:03 Hi, I'm Andrés and I'm Josephine. Welcome to the Remoter Podcast. Follow us in season one of this journey as we cover anything and everything you need to know in order to successfully build and scale a remote first team. As someone who's been working remotely for over a decade or CEO, Alexander Torrenegra shares his personal experiences, lessons learned, and advice for those of you who are curious and interested in exploring the future of work.
Josephine: 00:28 This podcast is brought to you by Torre, the end to end recruitment solution for Remoters. Get our free AI powered sourcing and processing tools, or let Torre recruit on your behalf at Torre dot co, that's T O R R E. Dot. C O.
[Music stops playing]
Andres: 00:52 So this is what's up. My name is Andrés Cajiao. I'm the cofounder and chief growth officer at Torre. And that title really is just the title. I mean, I'm just the guy that does everything from, you know, marketing and product and analytics and everything that takes for us to build these platform into skyrocket moon-shooting startup, which is what we're doing. A couple of months ago, I, I thought, you know, I'm really, really passionate about building content that is educational and that helps people do something with it, you know? And so I thought, why don't I try to find a human being that is passionate about working remotely, that is passionate about producing content that is educational and that helps, you know, people do things. So I started a pursuit to find the remote or ambassador, but while I was doing that, I also decided we should start producing content right away.
Andres: 01:45 I don't want to wait. So we started this podcast with Alex Torrenegra. He's my co founder and the CEO of Torre and with Eric, who at the time was helping us write a mass of aspects of our, of our library and you know, helping out with the product the project in general. So I finally found the human being that is passionate enough to go in this crazy adventure with us. I'd like to introduce you guys to her. Her name is Josephine and she is the Remoter Ambassador for Remoter, which is a project again, that is sponsored by Torre but I want it to be, you know, a little bit independent from, from our endeavours so that we can bring different voices and ideas to mind. So Josephine, welcome to the team. Welcome to the podcast. And why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself.
Josephine: 02:34 Thanks Andrea. So my name is Josephine. I'm from Toronto, Canada and I joined the team quite recently (a couple of weeks ago), learning all about remote work right now and helping create content for the Remoters site. We are currently in our beginning stages, but I'm excited for our listeners, our viewers, everyone to come along on this journey with us.
Andres: 03:00 All right, welcome again to the team Josephine. So with that in mind, let's hop into the first episode of the podcast. In this episode, Alex is going to share a little bit about how he got into remote work and the story behind the guy. I hope you guys enjoy it.
Erik: 03:16 So Alex, how did you get started with remote work?
Alex: 03:19 It's a long story and we'll try to fit it in the episode. But the same way that I came across entrepreneurship- out of necessity, not necessarily out of passion, but I've learned to love both after having used them for many years. So this is years2001. I met my wife Tania Zapata, we fell in love very quick, she wanted to become a professional voice actress.
Erik: 03:44 Okay.
Alex: 03:44 So we moved from Miami to New York City in late 2002. The only thing we could afford was a very tiny studio in Flushing, Queens in New York. That was on the last stop of the, either the seventh train or the F train. I no longer remember. But it took a significant amount of time to get to the city, to Manhattan if you wanted to go there. We learned about the industry, how voice actors found work and, and it was a cumbersome process. When a producer, when a buyer, wanted to hire a voice actor, they had to go through a casting director. Then the casting director would contact multiple talent agents. The talent agents would then identify voice actors they had in their database and ask them to go to an auditioning studio. And the voice actors would go there. The auditioning studio would send back the recording to the talent agent. It will get filtered. Then the best ones will be sent to the casting director. He or she would also filter them and then send them to the client. If the client, like one of the voices they got, then they would hire a full recording studio set-up to do the recording. Many of them will meet there. And again, if the recording when according to plan, then the client, the producer would pay yet another party called the paymaster. The paymaster would take the money and distribute it between the voice actor, the talent agent and the unions, the syndicates back then.
Erik: 05:09 That's a lot of mouths to feed just to get the work done.
Alex: 05:13 A lot of people. And it works, especially for English speaking voice actors. But voice actors in other languages, you didn't have much luck going through this process. And we are from Colombia my wife and I, so she was doing voiceovers in Spanish primarily, back then. Even we didn't this it was not necessarily about how good you were. It was more about who you knew. It wasn't a fair system. In fact, years later with the #MeToo movement, many voiceover coaches and talent agents ended up becoming infamous for having taken advantage of aspiring voice actors and voice actresses on that regard.
Andres: 05:48 Oh yuck.
Alex: 05:49 Oh yeah, indeed. So we came up with the idea, hey, let's do an online platform where people can cast voice actors and they don't have to go through all of those middlemen and we can make it fair so that it's not about who you know, but how good you are. And we thought about doing it in Spanish. I mean not only Spanish, but for voice actors in Spanish, when producers needing voices in Spanish and did that because here in the U.S., over 10% of the population is Hispanic. They speak Spanish. So it's a, it's a significant amount of people, like 35 million people in the U.S. Are Hispanic.
Erik: 06:20 And it wasn't being served by the existing network. So yeah, why not, right.
Alex: 06:23 Indeed. So we started looking online for, okay, what platforms out there do it for English speaking voice actors and none of them, I mean, there were none. So we looked at again. We thought we were crazy because I mean, you have an idea, you think it's so obvious and and nobody has done it or, or, or do you think, well, maybe they did it and they crashed and and that's why you cannot find them.
Erik: 06:46 It has to be a reason, right? I mean (laughs).
Alex: 06:48 So, you know, we decided, you know, this doesn't exist before the Spanish speaking voices. It's as complex as doing it for any, any language. So we might as well do the platform for people to find voice actors on any language. Or we started pursuing the idea. But remember, we were living in a tiny studio in Flushing, in New York City. I mean, it was so small that we used to joke that for a call to come in, we had to leave the apartment. And I mean, yeah we had two desks, but we had only space for one chair. So one of the desks for you to work on that desk, you had to see it actually on the bed. Yeah. If, whenever we had an argument with Tania, the only place where you could go was the bathroom to hide yourself. Yeah. So we started working on the project and this is a platform, a marketplace, online marketplace. So it requires a significant amount of coding. And Tania and I were doing full time work and after three months of work, I was way far away from developing what I needed to develop. And I came up with the idea of hiring part-time my best friend from college, and I had gone to college in Colombia and he accepted the idea. Now this is 2002, like broadband connectivity was, not even most of the population in the U.S. Had broadband connectivity. Most people are still connected to the internet via modem, right. There were a couple of tools already that allowed you to speak over the internet, Yahoo messenger and MSN messenger, I believe, were the first ones. So we were experimenting with new tools for being able to communicate remotely. Also, the engineers listening to the podcast, they know that when two engineers work on the same thing, they have to merge the code eventually. And today we have some good tools for doing so. And even today, sometimes it's a pain in the ass to those marriages. Way back in the day, these tools were more simple, so we had to arrange ways in which we wouldn't end up deleting the code that the other person has written whenever we did the marriages. Also, the idea of cloud computing was relatively, I mean that world didn't exist, cloud computing, as a term is more recent. But back in the day there were not really virtual servers so that that you could share, celebrate power with other people.
Alex: 08:51 I also enabled these, these kind of work. So, yeah, for many, many months a year I work remotely with people that I wouldn't see because video-conferencing wasn't a thing back then, right. I had to travel to Colombia and I did travel to Colombia in 2005 and that's when I saw my friend again, his face for the first time other than pictures.
Erik: 09:13 Did you make him look a lot older? (Laughs).
Alex: 09:17 So anyway, it was our only option. Like we didn't start doing remote work, because oh, we can hire an engineer in New York City for X amount of money or an engineer Colombia for this amount of money. We didn't even think about hiring a person in New York City because we knew we couldn't afford it. So the only option was hiring and now it's not like we were exploiting our friend in Colombia. Back in the day, a good engineer in Colombia was earning around 1/10th the salary of a good engineer in New York City. And that's more or less what we offered him. So for him it was actually a good salary and he was very happy with the idea of joining the team remotely from that, on that regard. So in June 12 of 2003, we finally launched Voice123 and it had been collecting email addresses of voice actors. We sent an email to our own 10,000 voice actors. Over 20% of them ended up creating accounts in the system. And then we started doing some paid ads in Google. Google AdWords was also new back then. You could buy traffic for very low prices and we started getting clients requesting voiceovers right away. Yeah. When we started working with the idea, I remember telling Tania, if we can ever make $3,000 per month back because of this investment that we are doing in Voice123, this will have been a great investment.
Erik: 10:30 Basically the rent and some groceries, right.
Alex: 10:32 I bought in New York City not even that, but yeah, we ended up hitting a home run. Not even six months after that, we were making way over $3,000 a month. Within two years, it was the largest casting service for voice actors offline or online. And today by far it's the largest platform for companies to search and find voice actors and continues, continues to grow. Initially, well we need remote work with the engineer, but we also ended up transforming the voiceover industry, not even realizing we were doing so. And we set up the system taking into account what used to be the hubs of voice over craft in the U.S. -Chicago, LA, and New York City. That's where most of the recording studios were. So we wanted to make it easy for producers to cast voice actors in their cities, but only for the casting, the actual recording, they will have to go to the studio.
Alex: 11:19 So we invested a significant amount of time actually building the logic for that, but we were surprised to see that very quickly. Most of the projects, by far over 95% of the projects were asking for the voice actor to do the recording in their own studios, wherever they lived, and just send the recording via the internet to them.
Erik: 11:38 So they became remote workers too.
Alex: 11:40 So they became remote work too, indeed. And initially they had to coordinate with like local radio stations to do recording. Years later, today is the norm. If you're a voice actor, you have a recording studio in your house. And there are many ways of making sure that, that it sounds professional and that you use a professional recording studio. But yeah, so, so we ended up transforming the voiceover industry from being a city based or location based industry over to being an online industry.
Alex: 12:06 And today, not only the industry has, has grown significantly, but by far most voice actors that are successful are not in those large cities.
Erik: 12:15 You never intended to create a new industry, but it just came out of the whole process.
Alex: 12:19 It was the unintended happy consequence. There are many people that have been able to grow their professional careers by living in their homes. And one of the most I mean, as an entrepreneur, as a techie person, creating technology and seeing people use your technology is great. But the best feeling is when we are out in the street walking and somea voice actor that we don't know because there are hundreds of thousands of voice actors in the system, they recognize us. They say, thanks, like you changed my life. You allowed me to start voice acting career by working from home. Many mothers are in the platform as a consequence of that. So, so that, that's beautiful. And it's one of the reasons I became passionate about remote work because I could see firsthand how good it was, not only for the client, because the client can now tap into a significantly larger database of people to select from. But for the people, for the talent so that they could do what I like to call more fulfilling work.
Andres: 13:14 So Alex, the way that you got started into remote work was by necessity. You founded a business with your partner, Tania, back in 2002. And you guys were living in a shitty studio in New York.
Alex: 13:25 It was small, it wasn't shitty.
Andres: 13:27 It was fancy but small. All right?
Alex: 13:32 It wasn't fancy either. (Laughs) It was cozy.
Andres: 13:34 It was adequate. Okay. You had an adequate studio in New York. You weren't broke but you weren't rich. Right.
Alex: 13:42 Yeah, we were broke. (Laughs) Being broke doesn't mean being shitty, so.
Andres: 13:46 Okay, got it. Got it. Okay. Let's be semantically correct. Now, you wanted this business to grow and you wanted to be able to put it out there and in order to do that, you need some help, some hands, but you would- just not going to be able to find those hands in New York with the capital that you had because given your job and given Tania's job at the moment. So remote work ended up being an enabler and it was an enabler, not just for you, but it was also an enabler. Ended up being an enabler for a bunch of voice actors around the world. We're now able to work in gigs for big productions and companies in LA, in Chicago and New York and wherever else those companies were as well. And they were able to earn, you know, for their voice acting as if they were close by to those companies but they didn't have to. It also, now that I'm, that I'm recapping, it was also an enabler for the companies that wanted to work with voice talent and that wanting to find the best possible voice out there and that maybe, if they'd limited themselves to the city in which they were, they wouldn't be able to, that unique voice, that branding voice that they were looking for and maybe, or that particular style that we're looking for. So it was also an enabler for companies to find the best possible talent voice out into these case out there.
Alex: 15:03 And then for the, for the person, for the remoter, there are two core benefits. One is the opportunity of finding more fulfilling work because the same, the same thing now. If you limit your search to local work, well, you have certain amounts of opportunities. But if you go remote, then you can tap into potentially a thousand times more opportunities out there that may match what you want to do. That may match your specialty, your dreams, what you want to do with your professional career. The second benefit is work life integration as opposed to work life balance. Now, the concept of work life balance puts work on one side of the balance and life on the other, on the other side. And I get it, why we ended up there like the industrial revolution and the upgrading a lot of jobs that people necessarily didn't like you had to work 60 hours a week in a factory doing the same thing over and over again. And of course for many people doing that work is not life. That work is something that you have to do. It feels like hell, probably, for many of them. So you had to find a way of balancing that with the rest of the things you wanted to do in life. Today, for many people, especially for people that can work remotely, work is one of the core elements for them to have a fulfilling life. One of the most important things alongside family, alongside friends and society.
Erik: 16:17 And it's your personal identity, what you do for the world. Yeah.
Alex: 16:20 It is. And that allows for work to become an integral part of life. So it's a work life integration and sometimes in many instances, remote work also comes with not only location flexibility, but time flexibility. So you can also do things because you can be anywhere you otherwise couldn't do because you have to be in an office, in an office setting.
Andres: 16:41 Okay. I'm seeing a trend that more and more people, and millennials and or these articles talked about how we are more mission-driven. And in order for someone to be aligned with the mission of your company, it might not be as easy to find someone that is aligned with the mission of your company, has the hard skills that you need, has the soft skills that you need and is aligned with the culture of how you do things. It might be harder to find all those things combined in your city, you know, a few blocks away from an office that you set up. And that's where I feel like all these factors are convoluting right? We're not only looking for talent that can, you know, put screws on a new hardware product. We're looking for talent that are passionate about a certain mission and that have the interest of developing the skills that the business needs that time to develop so that as the business grows, the talent grows and we have to coordinate a lot of factors and being able to tap into talent globally seems to me like a good way to do that.
Alex: 17:36 I completely agree. I mean innovation, and this comes back with the diversity aspect, but innovation, my definition is connecting dots that have not been connected before. And the farther away those dots are, and the stronger the line you draw between them, the better the innovation that you're coming up with.
Andres: 17:54 So I feel like we need to care more about who this person is, where does he or she wants to go and how is that aligned with what the company has to offer and what the company needs.
Alex: 18:02 I fully agree and that's why you have to use torre dot co.
Erik: 18:05 Yeah, very good, very good. I guess if you have passion you can find the skills, but skills don't necessarily create passion (Laughs).
Andres: 18:15 I fully agree with that.
[Podcast music background track - stinger]
Josephine: 18:24 I only knew a fraction of what Alex was talking about in the podcast just by, you know, looking up online and whatnot. His story is really, really interesting and I'm super glad to be part of this team and to join you guys and work on the Remoter brand and everything. I am super excited for what's to come as well for my path along this remote work journey. This is my first time in this work environment and even though it's been a couple of weeks, I've really enjoyed it so far. It's been a learning curve for me but I'm excited to see where this will take me for the year.
Andres: 19:05 Well, welcome to the team and welcome to remote work. It is the future of work. And to our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. I do want to thank you for not only hearing our story but also I know that you will engage with us and share with you with us actually, your thoughts. And this is really part of what we like to do. We like to build platforms that take into consideration what the world needs with what humanity needs. We believe that humanity moves forward when talent meets opportunity and gets to work, really. And, and our mission at Torre is to make work fulfilling. So any ideas that come to mind, any projects that we can work together, anything that you'd like to share with us, that'd be awesome. I'll be around, you can find me easily and I'd love to chat with you so, so thank you for tuning in again and I hope we can hear you on the next- we can hear you, not actually, you can hear us and we can read your comments and ideas on our next episode.
[Cue podcast background music track, same one used in the introduction]
Andres: 20:09 Thank you so much for tuning in. A few last words, you enjoyed that episode. Please...
Josephine: 20:14 Follow us on social media at remoter project and let us know what you think about the latest episode.
Andres: 20:20 We'd love for you to join us as we continue building the Remoter Library on our website, remoter dot com. That's R E M O T E R dot com.
Josephine: 20:29 If you want even more resources, sign up for our free Founding and Growing Remotely online course. You can find that on our website or check the description for links. Don't forget to follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Andres: 20:45 And remember, we're here to make work fulfilling. So I'd like to ask you, what part will you play in shaping the future of work?
[End music]