Listen and learn about Alexander Torrenegra's remote work journey origins, which started out of necessity in 2002. 2002 because of the invention of audio chats that didn't cost per minute. Today, we've got generations that have grown up with the Internet, but back then, it was a matter of making do with what they had.
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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: 00:00 Hi, I'm Andrés.
Josephine: 00:03 And I'm Josephine. Welcome to the Remoter Podcast.
Andres: 00:07 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, our 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: 00:33 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: 00:54 Even though you and I, Josephine, we're really, really young, in a way um...
Josephine: 00:58 Oh for listeners, we're like in our early twenties, if that helps.
Andres: 01:03 Um I, we didn't have to go through the kind of struggles that Alex had to go through when setting up a remote first team 17 years ago.
Josephine: 01:19 17 years ago. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah.
Andres: 01:22 So we don't really know about, you know, the struggles of not being able to do a video call or, or talk real time to discuss a topic, or merging code, or stuff like that. Like right now we have GitLab and we have GitHub and we have you know, Zoom, and today I actually saw a tool that is like a copy of Zoom, but like people in Russia use it. I don't know. But anyways, point is we have so many tools at our disposal and we literally grew up with the internet. So we didn't know about those struggles. But it's interesting too to see, you know, how that came to be. Because I feel like in the future we'll have different struggles and, you know, learning about your past, it's useful to determine, you know, your future.
Erik: 02:07 So Alex, in the early days, I mean, how did you manage your remote team? You talked a little bit about some of the tools you used and all that. Could you, could you elaborate and how you made all that work?
Alex: 02:15 Well, I started in 2002, managing remote teams, again, out of necessity and I think that one of the most important tools that had been invented around that time that allowed us to do this was free audio conversations with people anywhere on earth. Before that, until the year 2000 I believe, you had to pay by the minute to make a phone call somewhere else on earth.
Andres: 02:44 You have a budget for like phone calls?
Alex: 02:47 No, we did. I mean this is 1999-2000. 2002, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger. They were already big mainstream, and they work well over broadband connectivity, over high speed internet connection because back then most people would connect to the internet by a modem still. So with that, with that free access to audio communication, now I could interact with other people much quicker and that enabled that kind of remote work.
Erik: 03:12 That was the game changer that made it possible.
Alex: 03:14 Today, most people, when they go remote for the first time, their first experiences is HD video. That's great for them and they can share their screen. Back in the day, you couldn't share the screen, you couldn't see the other person. You could only listen to the other person and chat, text message, the other person using one of those tools.
Andres: 03:31 So what was it, it was MSN with the ba-zing or was it Yahoo messenger?
Alex: 03:35 Whichever was working fine that day. They kept improving their algorithms. The quality of the audio kept improving. Eventually Skype like won over for having the best audio quality. Eventually, some of them started to offer video as well, although video was very unreliable. It would make the computers very slow. It would use a lot of bandwidth and then the entire internet would come slow if you did that. So yeah, that's, that's how it was. And in terms of the management, it wasn't very different than any other performance-based management. I mean, you can lead people, manage people in two ways. One is, you measure the amount of hours that they are sitting in their desks or you measure the output of their work. You can do both in some cases, but if you work remotely, the only way in which you can manage all the members of your team is really by measuring the output. It is performance based management. This is actually relatively easy for tech teams. I had a lot of experience with agile methodologies. So for me agile development is very important. So to this day we have a meeting with all of the members of the team. If we add in different time zones, I wake up at 6:30 AM because some members of my team are in timezones up to four hours apart and I don't want to block their days by having a daily meeting in the middle of their work day. So I tried to wake up pretty early.
Andres: 04:58 I have to suffer.
Alex: 04:58 When you move to San Francisco, right now. But yeah, to this day I continue using agile and, and performance based management. And since then, I've learned many other methodologies, such as KPIs and, OKRs and such. In terms of, of how remote work has evolved, another challenge back in the day was actually wiring money overseas because we had to wire money to engineers in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, et cetera, et cetera and it's not common, especially in Colombia for an individual- and now it is common. Back in the day, it wasn't common for an individual to get small amounts of money wired from the U.S. Now, imagine Colombia late nineties, early two thousands, somebody in the U.S. Is wiring you money to Colombia. What are you going to think the money is arriving for? So, so, and actually it wasn't the U.S. Banks giving us headaches. It was the banks in Latin America giving headaches to our team members releasing their money into their bank accounts. They had to go through a lot of paperwork to validate, to guarantee that the money was clean and it wasn't that they were doing any dirty business or anything like that.
Andres: 06:05 You still have to do that nowadays. Like I remember once I was in France and I had, I wasn't making that much money, but I was, I had $3,000 wired to my account. I was in a different country. I had no money in my pocket- in my pocket. I was depending on that one client paying and they paid and was super happy. But then I noticed that money didn't go into my account. So it was about three days of figuring out what the hell happened, right? So they sent the, they send the payment confirmation from Wells Fargo, here in the U.S. And I was like, okay, they did pay, where's the money? So I called my bank and it's like, yeah, the money's here in Colombia, but you have to come to an office and bring us a document that certifies that that money isn't, well where's that money coming from? I'm like, yeah, but like I mean friends. But what ended up happening is that I had to go through Paris with no money. They wouldn't release the money. It still happens now. That is incredible to me. How do you end up solving that?
Alex: 07:03 I think the market has solved that to a large degree. I mean today, Airbnb for example, they have hosts all over the place and they have to wire money from the U.S. To hosts all over the place. So more and more banks and regulators are open to this idea of people getting small amounts of money wired from anywhere on earth. Now there are companies where you can send a credit card or the equivalent of a debit card to your team members all over the world and every month, you'd just deposit money into that card that they have. And that means that the money doesn't have to go through a local bank, per se. That has evolved. Internet connectivity is potentially one of the most important game changers as well on that front. Back in the day, 2002, broadband connectivity meant that you a modem, those of you listening that, remember what that was? The first modem were 9600 beats per second and that was good enough for text messaging, for chatting. Some slow web browsing that actually ended up being ramped up to 14K and 28K and the fastest modems ended up being at 56K. Again, good enough for browsing Google and Amazon.com. Broadband was 128 Kbs. I remember my first remote employee, that was his broadband speed. It was just good enough for an audio conversation of relatively good quality and chatting at the same time and that's it. Well, since then the speeds have increased by orders of magnitude. Today it's very common to find 1 GB connections in many places on earth, which allow people to share and communicate this stuff at a significantly higher speed than ever before. I think that the idea of working remotely is also something that that has changed a lot. When we were hiring people in Colombia or working remotely, it sounded very weird back in the day. Like, what do you mean? I'm going to be working out of Colombia for a company in the U.S? It sounds too good to be true, and even today if you go to to most places, if you were to take 10 engineers randomly from all over earth and you ask them, whether they think it will be viable for them to work for a company that is based in Silicon Valley, or work with a team that is fully distributed, probably most of them are going to say, no, that's not not viable. Or they wouldn't be able to do that and not because they don't think that they couldn't do it themselves. It's so that for many of them, the idea sounds, it's still too farfetch for it to be a reality. But more and more people have realized that when they want to grow professionally, they don't have to think local. They have to grow, they can, they can go global. And English is also an important factor. More and more you see people speaking English because they have been exposed to English material from an earlier age than previous generations and that of course opens the door for them to work remotely, not only within their own countries and nations that share the same language, but pretty much anywhere on earth.
Erik: 10:09 So there are all kinds of infrastructure that had been building for 20, 30 years that are making this possible. I mean there's not, there's not one thing that changed necessarily.
Alex: 10:17 In the, yeah, it was the perfect storm and it just continues to improve. Zoom, the video conferencing tool, it went public a few weeks ago. They went public and they are very successful because it's really good video conferencing software, but it's going to continue improving. I'm sure that the tools we are going to be using 10 years from now are going to be significantly better than the tools we use today. We can't even imagine what those tools are going to be. I mean we are working in one of them by the way. Actually a few of them that for now I didn't know for testing but, but they might become mainstream a few years down the line. We'll see.
Erik: 10:49 Well I remember when Yahoo messenger seemed like just, wonderful. So yeah.
Alex: 10:54 And since then we have, we went from Yahoo messenger- we went from ICQ in the late nineties to Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, Skype and Skype was eventually replaced by Slack on the video part by, by Zoom- no, by Google HangOuts, and the Google HangOuts was being replaced now by Zoom in, in most companies. So yeah, every, every five years or so, we have something that ends up replacing what used to be the norm.
Erik: 11:19 So Alex, you started out using remote work simply out of necessity 'cause you had to, but at what point did you decide that remote work was the future of work and it became sort of this business in and of itself?
Alex: 11:32 I was watching a documentary in evolution and it explained that one of the theories about evolution is that it leads to a specialization.
Erik: 11:41 Okay.
Alex: 11:41 That the more time a species has had to evolve, the higher the chances that the different components of that species have a specialize, and you see a specialization at the cell level. The first cells were very simple, but today, we see cells that are very complex, that have many different moving parts. Eventually, you find a species that have organisms within the species that are performing different functions. Ants are good examples, you have ants doing many different things. You get to humans right? Where not only as individuals, we have many different pieces in our body doing many different things that are highly specialized, but now as individuals within those species, we can also do a lot of specialized things, right? Then 300 years ago in general, most people could pick out of 50 professions or something.
Erik: 12:39 Farmer, blacksmith, yeah.
Alex: 12:41 Right? Fast forward to the previous century, there are over 50,000 different career paths for people to specialize on and the number continues to grow. The more knowledge we develop as humans, the more opportunities for specialization there are. And the more the specialization there is, the more complex things we can create as human species. Okay. And as we grow that knowledge, it becomes more and more difficult for you to find people that specialize on a given topic that live near you. And we are experiencing exponential growth right now. So I do believe that while 300 years ago we could pick out of 50 professions and 50 years ago we could pick out 50,000, in 50 years in the future, we'll be able to pick from potentially 500,000 or 5 million different specifications, right?
Alex: 13:38 What are the chances that you're going to find a person that has specialized into something in the same city where you live? They are going to be lower and lower and lower as we grow as a species. So the need for remote work and the opportunity for remote work, is that you can find those specialists not only from a pool of 5 million people that live near you, but from a pool of seven, eight. But from a pool of seven or 8 billion people that live anywhere on earth. So that realization is what led me to believe that remote work is going to be there, not because it's a business opportunity, because it's a necessity for human kind to keep moving forward.
Erik: 14:30 So with the increased specialization, we need to connect and we need to integrate more and those connections just get longer and longer all the time. So the, the burden on the integration to make it possible to continue to evolve is working at some distance, making the connection at a distance then.
Alex: 14:48 Correct. Correct.
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Andres: 14:58 So you know, we were talking about this at lunch actually, we just, we just had, what was it, Thai?
Josephine: 15:03 Yeah, we just had Thai food.
Andres: 15:05 Okay. Well we're, we're talking about it because I just moved into Toronto. I'm going to be staying here for like five months or so. Potentially more if I figure out the visa situation and so on.
Josephine: 15:14 And I hope you do.
Andres: 15:15 Of course. But with that in mind, I was, I was sharing with you how hard it has been to move here because for example, I like I can not rent an apartment here. I cannot buy a car. I mean I can, but it takes a lot of work. So that's kind of the struggles you have when you move from a city. But when you're establishing a remote team, I find it interesting that there are similarities in terms of like the struggles of doing basic things such as communicating back in day.
Josephine: 15:47 Because he was saying he was using like MSN messenger and like Yahoo and all that. Oh, MSN messenger, oh the memories.
Andres: 15:55 Yeah, I used to use that to send a lot of, what was it? Gifs, was it GIFs? Was it stickers? What was, was the, we used to send through MSN. It wasn't emojis. I mean it was emojis...?
Josephine: 16:08 It was like an old version of what we use today of the emojis and the stickers and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Like an old, I remember I used to like set like the screen names and everybody would have like...
Andres: 16:18 Oh yeah, rainbows and colors.
Josephine: 16:22 I remember that.
Andres: 16:22 Well that was fun. That was for fun.
Josephine: 16:24 But imagine working with it. Oh my gosh.
Andres: 16:28 I don't think it would have been as fun. Like think about threads on Slack, for example. How would have you, how would have you handled threads on messenger? You will...
Josephine: 16:35 I don't know, there, there would've been a lot of conversations and chat boxes and.. Can, can you even save conversation history?... Like...
Andres: 16:46 Yeah, I actually used to save the conversations with my girlfriends.
Josephine: 16:51 Oh, okay. Okay. Well good to know that there was that feature, but no, we definitely have it way easier today and that's something I'm, I guess we take for granted, at least I think I do because it's just at my disposal. I just use it. I don't really give it a second thought, but listening to Alex's stories just kind of help me check, I guess the privilege we have today of all the tools we have to use.
Andres: 17:15 You know, that was, that was 17 years ago and, and counting. But I'd like to hear from our audience like when, when did you start working remotely? How long ago was it and what do you remember from the tools you had and the processes that you had? How has that evolved? I will love to have a conversation about the topic.
Josephine: 17:34 For those of you who are just starting out as well or looking to start out, on remoter.com we actually offer a guide, it's called the Remoter Guide. You can find more details in the description below, got some links for you and we touch base on all the communication tools that we here use as a team.
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Andres: 17:57 Thank you so much for tuning. A few last words. If you enjoyed that episode, please...
Josephine: 18:03 Follow us on social media at remoter project and let us know what you think about the latest episode.
Andres: 18:08 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: 18:17 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: 18:33 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?