Even though Alexander Torrenegra has been working remotely for over 17 years, he too had once decided to set up a physical office space when he first moved to San Francisco. But what lessons has he since taken away from the experience?
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A big thank you to our post-production wizard, Vanesa Monroy.
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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: 00:29 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, T O R R E. dot. C O.
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Josephine: 00:52 Welcome back to the remoter podcast. Glad you guys can join us again. Um, episode one for me was quite eye opening and I hope that was open-eye opening for you as well. But there... has been one burning question that I've, uh, kind of sat with for the last week and that is, how can Alex say all these things about remote work if he's never worked in an office before?
Andres: 01:18 So the thing is, you'll hear it in this episode, he actually has. And I like that you're discovering the podcast as you hear it and you're discovering kind of like along our listeners. So I really like that. Uh, but he actually has worked in an office before and there's an interesting story to that. So I'd love for you guys to hear it.
Alex: 01:37 I like to experiment with things and uh, and the first few companies I found that they did well being remote companies, but people, mentors I had, and friends I had that had created successful businesses kept questioning that remote approach. They thought that especially for a startup, when you need to do a lot of brainstorming, you need to have a lot of conversations with other members of your team to figure out what you actually want to do with the company, to do it remotely would limit significantly that communication, would limit the output.
Erik: 02:10 Because you don't have the white boards and all of this stuff that goes with, post-its...
Alex: 02:12 Which I had never depended on but that many other people would actually use.
Andres: 02:19 Your mentors and advisors had asked.
Alex: 02:22 Yeah. So this is 2012, we had cofounded again, we, Tania, Tania Zapata my wife, we had cofounded another business called VoiceBunny- today that businesses is known as a Bunny Studios. And the difference between Voice123, which is the one that we had co-founded in 2002 is that Voice123 is more like a shopping mall. And the shopping mall, you go and you find where do you want to go and you pick your store and then you transact directly. So at Voice123, at Voice123 you cast voice actors and you find the one you like and then we allow you to transact any way you want. We don't get in the middle of the transaction if you don't want to. But many clients, they wanted us to tend voices for them, a hundred voices, a thousand voices. They didn't want to hire the freelancers directly, right? So they wanted more of a production studio. They wanted us to provide them with an API and as many automation tools as possible. So we created uh, VoiceBunny and uh, it's a highly automated production service.
Alex: 03:15 What some people here in the Bay area call an "end to end marketplace." Where you can get voiceovers recorded and you don't even know the name of the voice actor during the voice recording for you. Because in many instances, it's not even you asking for the voice, it's a client of yours using your website and then getting the order transferred to our system via our API, et cetera.
Erik: 03:34 So it's the one stop shop for all your voice needs.
Alex: 03:37 Yeah. Well now it's also for your writing needs, for translation needs, post production and many of the things we are expanding into anything that we call mission critical creative outsourcing.
Erik: 03:46 Great.
Alex: 03:46 So we founded the company in late 2011, 2012. It started to grow and we had been thinking about moving to San Francisco. We got pregnant and we realized we have to move now because otherwise we are never going to move to San Francisco.
Erik: 04:00 So you had the commitment.
Alex: 04:02 Yeah. Yeah. And uh, and we moved to San Francisco and we decided, you know, San Francisco, the mecca of tech talent, we are going to build an office here and we are going to pay the salaries of San Francisco to bring the best of the best because this is going to be not another home run, this is going to be a huge win for us because it's going to be much bigger than anything we had done before.
Andres: 04:23 That was 10 years after your first company?
Alex: 04:26 That was 10 years after.
Andres: 04:26 So you were working remotely for 10 years with Voice123 and then you decided to move to San Francisco because of personal reasons. And then you said, you know what, I'm going to take advantage of moving to San Francisco and I'm going to actually build an office and attract the best of the best to work on this new venture because we wanted, you know, we want a moonshot here. Yeah. Awesome.
Alex: 04:47 And um, we found what's called in San Francisco, live work space, which is a house or an apartment where you can both live and work, have an office setting, legally speaking.
Erik: 04:59 What was that?
Alex: 05:00 So we found the place in a, an area called Mille Plaza. It's uh, in SOMA in between Market Street and Mission Street, Fifth Avenue and Soma is the center of the startups and tech companies in San Francisco for multiple reasons. But we wanted a central place because we wanted to attract talent that wouldn't have issues with public transportation so that the office was half a block away from BART, which is the most important train system in the San Francisco area. And not far away from Caltrain, which is another train system in here and half a block from MUNI as well, which is another transportation system in San Francisco. So we wanted to attract talent. We want an office setting that will be really attractive. So even though it was a home work live space, we wanted it to be as professional as possible. So we had standing desks, we had sit down desks, we had the walls filled with dashboards. We had my dad cooking lunch for us every single day. His food is delicious. So we were, we were, uh, delivering the works for the members of the team that we hired.
Erik: 06:05 It had to be pricey though, right?
Alex: 06:07 It was very expensive. I mean, we were paying salaries three to four times the salaries that I had been paying to our team in Latin America. More expensive talent. And some of the talent that I had been able to find in New York city. Talent in San Francisco is too expensive, and it's just getting expensive-er every year.
Andres: 06:24 You're flipping veil because you thought that in order to be like Google in terms of success, you had to actually invest in like, you know, having someone, cook people lunch and, and having an office in San Francisco and all those things, right?
Alex: 06:37 Yeah, yeah. We are competing with Google for talent now. We are in their, in their backyard. So, so we needed to offer something really good. So we had Bunny Happy Hours. So Fridays, we would open the doors in the office and not only we had free drinks and free food, but you could bring anyone that you knew, uh, to the office for free, for networking purpose, for PR to attract talent, et cetera, et cetera.
Andres: 07:00 So why wasn't I working with you in that time?
Alex: 07:03 And um, so as we grew, I had to build a very structured operations team. Santiago Jaramillo had a media came to mind. So he's a friend of mine that used to have his own company and he's really good at what he does. But he is Colombian. He was living in Colombia. So we had to do all of the paperwork for his visa. And getting work visas in the U.S. is a pain in the ass. It takes a significant amount of time, it's expensive, but we went through the process because I thought it was worth it, but after investing $7,000 or so on legal fees and the application process, the government, they didn't even look at the application. Right. There is a lottery system in here that the government didn't even consider giving him a visa to come to the U.S.
Andres: 07:42 Because he didn't win the lottery.
Alex: 07:43 Because he didn't win the lottery.
Erik: 07:45 So yeah, you're just out of luck, right.
Alex: 07:47 My only option of course was to to find another person, but then he pitched me the idea of building an operations team in Colombia. I was against that because I had tried that in the past with remote team members. It didn't work that well, but he insisted, insisted, insisted and knowing how good he is, I decided to give him the green light. So very quickly from having one office in San Francisco, we ended up having two offices, one in San Francisco, one in Bogota, and he actually did pretty well. I mean he not only he build a kick ass operations team, he eventually became chief operations officer and now he's the CEO of the holding entity, the group that owns the companies that we have founded. Uh, so I actually report to him now.
Andres: 08:31 Yeah. Okay. So you had a business for 10 years working remotely with engineers in Colombia, but you were hesitant about having a remote team again?
Alex: 08:39 I wasn't hesitant. I just wanted to experiment having an office-based team, uh, given the many good things I had heard about following that approach.
Andres: 08:49 But what happened with the team that you already had in Colombia?
Alex: 08:52 I wasn't working Voice123 any longer. Yeah. So Voice123 continued being a remote team during all that.
Alex: 08:58 Right. So this is, this is a new company that we had founded.
Andres: 09:00 Got it.
Erik: 09:01 It was all VoiceBunny, the Bunny Enterprises.
Alex: 09:03 Yeah. I like that one. Bunny Enterprises. Now as we hired talent, we were able to hire the talent both in San Francisco and Bogota. I mean we were a strictly office-based. You had to work out of the office, you could work from home every now and then if you wanted, but you had to work out of an office environment frequently. That meant that we were able to find talent in both cities and we were able to compare talent in both cities. And what we ended up realizing is that yes, that leaving San Francisco is good, but talent in the Bogota office was equally good. Uh, although one-third costs.
Erik: 09:37 So you don't always get what you pay for.
Alex: 09:42 We also started having some people wanting to move away of cities in particular in, in, in Colombia, Bogota is a very rough city. Public transportation is bad, there aren't that many highways. So commuting to an office in Bogota is not that friendly for many people. So some of the engineers, we started to hire over there after a while they said, you know, I want to move away. I want to go to another city, a smaller city in Bogota, sorry, in Colombia, and we were telling him, well, you have to quit because we are office-based and that felt wrong because of the remote experience we had. We knew that we could do it, but just because of this policy we were excluding good talent.
Erik: 10:19 You were office-based and you were taking advantage of of what everyone has said. Were they the reasons for being in an office, right?
Alex: 10:25 Yes, yes. And we had the whiteboard and I tried to use the whiteboard with other members of the team. Now, something else that happened is that, remember that when we moved to San Francisco, we're pregnant. My daughter, Azul, initially she was confined to a certain area in the live work space that we had. But as she started to crawl, well the entire office became her playground. I mean we, we loved it. I loved to work with her like while carrying her and all of the members of the team, had great interactions with her but it started to become dangerous and it's very difficult to baby proof an office. So we decided to split and we moved to a small apartment with my wife and my daughter and we rented an actual office space for the, for the office.
Erik: 11:07 So no more smell of dry erase markers and poopy diapers.
Alex: 11:09 Indeed, indeed. Candidates didn't have to change diapers any longer as part of the interview. Um, so before, whenever I had a phone call or something like that, because I like to pace around when we were working out of the live work environment, I could go to my room and just pace around cause I'm loud, I'm passionate when I'm having phone conversations. When we moved to the new office space, we didn't have that much space and I was interrupting the rest of the team or I had to take phone calls while being sitting in a table, which I don't like. So after a year or so, I found myself working from home most of the time, even though I had an office here. So that combined with the fact that we were finding really good talent that wasn't necessarily based in San Francisco, plus the fact that there were some members of the team that to migrate to other cities led us to decide to go remote again. Also, we were in a, in a moment where the finances weren't that good for the business. So we had to be very mindful in terms of costs.
Erik: 12:05 Okay.
Alex: 12:06 With all of those reasons, we decided to shut down the office in San Francisco and migrate the office in Bogota to being fully remote. Three years after we started with an, with an office, uh, we were shutting down and one year later, we were all remote once again.
Erik: 12:21 I get you, you didn't, just didn't realize the advantages that you were anticipating by having an office where everybody comes together.
Alex: 12:27 There were some advantages. I mean, definitely social advantages. We were having fun. We were having drinks, we were playing board games and video games and brainstorming happened more spontaneously. But there were other things that were not that good. For example, brainstorming, when you're doing brainstorming in person, it's very easy to end up in group think. And that is the first idea that someone puts on the table ends up biasing the ideas of the other people,
Erik: 12:53 Right? Especially if somebody is more dominant or extroverted.
Alex: 12:56 When you are remote, brainstorms many times happen in a synchronous way and that is, you post a question, people think about it and then they answer it and they can ignore the questions, the answers of other people before they provide their own answer. And that way, avoid group think. So that's an advantage of actually having a remote team that I had not realized, plus many of the others. So I mean, I enjoyed having an office. It was a really nice experience, but I just realized that the benefits of being remote are significantly higher. Do I have friends today? Yes, I have friends. It's only that that, that many of them are not necessarily office related. Am I as close friends with the members of the team that are remotely as I was with the members of the team that were based out of the office? Definitely not because I don't get to share as much personal time with them as otherwise I could if I were based out of an office. But nobody is more and more... just, you see companies pitching the idea that you're joining a team, you're not joining a family, you're joining a team and while you are good and you're going to be here because we want the best of the best. And that's very compatible with the idea of having, having remote teams.
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Josephine: 14:12 And I'm sure you know, Andres, before Torre, I came from a pretty corporate world, um, worked in an office, nine to five commute to work every day. Spent three hours getting to and from work. So I know, I know people were like, why would you do that? And anyways, just kind of like discovering remote work has drastically changed my life even in the beginning weeks right now. It has drastically changed my life because I'm saving a lot more time. I'm not commuting to an office for example, getting a lot more work done. I feel much more productive and all that. Um, but I did have a pretty good experience in the office. So I used to work in a post production studio in downtown Toronto and the environment was very, it was very supportive and I enjoyed, um, being with my colleagues and seeing people and like socializing everyday. So that's definitely one thing I would say. Uh, I'm getting used to with remote work, just, um, not being able to see people every day and socialize and all that kind of stuff. Uh, but how about you? I like to know, because you are from Colombia. Uh, did you work in an office before Torre? Like, and what were your experiences over there?
Andres: 15:34 Yeah, so my, my first and only jo- employment, uh, job was actually was actually remote-first and then they went into an office. Um, I was in an office for like six months or so before I left to build my consulting, um, service agency sorta. And that consulting agency was actually based out of an office as well. I actually made a mistake of building an agency that was based out of an office and not really thinking about remote work at the beginning. 'Cause it just, I really didn't know about it, you know, and, in my experience comparing both experiences, you know, it has been really a game changer because it forces you to think about things that you wouldn't think about otherwise. Like how do you, um, how do you manage your time or how do you, um, manage, you know, other things that you have to do beyond work. How do you socialize with people, and so on. And, um, in Colombia at least, we have a structure in which like you're expected to work from eight to five and then go out and some people go for beers at five o'clock and, uh, then you know, head home and whatnot. Um, and, and I feel like we waste a lot of time in between the commuting and we make it a habit to always, you know, be going out for beers with our colleagues and um, all the, all these different things that we end up doing. They're not really, um, so important for life. Um, for example, small things, things such as eating. Um, just, I mean I'm, I'm a little obsessive about, you know, the waiting times for things. I don't really like to make lines. So, going out to eat with colleagues, we will usually have to wait for the restaurant to be, to have an availability for us and, and waiting line and then wait for the food and no way to pay and so on.
Andres: 17:32 And I'm very impatient. I don't really like to wait for things. So being able to have more control of my time was really, really helpful. But it's something that I definitely also, as you are experiencing right now, I had to experience and to learn where is my sweet spot. Because there's this whole range of different ways of doing things. You can go super obsessive and control every second and every minute of your life, you can do that. Um, there's some people that would like to do, Pomodoro technique in which they, uh, timebox their time for everything. Um, there's other people that like to timebox their time in general for like big projects and there's other people that don't like to timebox anything. And I feel like I'm in the middle like some days, some days I am the Pomodoro guy who like would time everything. Some days I'm the guy that really doesn't have any structured work for the day. I like that flexibility, you know, and, and not being tied physically to a place, um, allows me and has allowed me to do that because when I had my office job, um, I will have to go everyday to the same office, I'll have to go everyday to the same lunch places around my office and I will have to invest the same amount of time commuting. And there are some days that I will, I, that I wish I didn't have to commute 'cause I had so many urgent things to do and you know, some days I really didn't want to commute because the day was shitty and I wanted to stay at home, you know. So having that flexibility to decide where to work, it's something that has definitely, um, made a difference in, in, in my life at least
Josephine: 18:58 Just hearing that I already, I mean I 100% agree with everything you said 'cause I felt the same way as well. Like sometimes I've, I'm, I mean my job before, I was working as a producer for the, um, post production studio, I didn't have to be on site to do the work. It was helpful for the industry and for everything. It was helpful for me to be there in person, but I didn't necessarily have to be present to get the job done. And um, all those thoughts were running through my head when I was at my previous job. And it's just pretty surreal to me that I can kind of, um, see the other side of, on like the work environment spectrum. Just try the other side of the spectrum, remote work, see how it is and be able to compare it with my previous office experience. So I'm really thankful to be in a position like this, um, as I am sure you are as well. Uh, and I look forward to seeing what it brings out.
Andres: 20:03 I encourage you and I encourage all listeners to explore and figure out what they like, what they like to do and what you like to do. So in my case, for example, I like, at Torre, we have a part of the team that likes to work out of an office and likes to work with the team. We're still a remote-first company, meaning that when we join meetings, even if they are in an office, each one of them will join on an individual computer with individual headsets and talk individually, um, even if it's like four of them in an office, right. And I used to join them and I did that for awhile and it was a really, really cool because I would, I would get the benefits of going to an office, socializing, as you were saying, socializing, having the environment of an office and so on, it's pretty cool. And I elect that and I did that for a couple of months and then I also have been working, you know, pretty, so like right now here in Toronto, you're about to set sail and start flying all around the world. So I know I'm going to have a lot of solo time physically. And I've also, you know, being to, um, San Francisco for example, where we recorded a podcast and I worked alongside Alex, um, for a while as well. And I've also went to go working spaces both regularly or even once or twice every week and so on. So I've, I've figured out, I've had the chance to experiment with different ways of working and I found the ones that I liked the most. Um, unfortunately in the process I've had to buy three different screens because I have one in San Francisco, one in Bogota and one here in Toronto, um, and equipment, it's not, it's not cheap, but, um, with all the money that we save in office space with all the money that we save, um, in many of the logistics of working out of a physical office, um, we can invest in, in, you know, equipment, equipment that our team needs. So, so that's something I definitely both encourage you to experiment as, as a part of a team and also leaders, to encourage your team to, to, to find that spot where they're, they like to work. I have someone in the team that loves to travel a lot and I love to find him, you know, working, uh, out of VIP lounges and he's like, VIP lounges are his co-working spaces, you know? So yeah, that's something I definitely, definitely encourage.
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Andres: 22:12 Thank you so much for tuning in. A few last words, if you enjoyed that episode. Please...
Josephine: 22:16 Follow us on social media at remoter project and let us know what you think about the latest episode.
Andres: 22:22 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: 22:31 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: 22:47 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?
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