Becoming remote fluent with Andres Cajiao of Torre

Welcome today's guest is Andres Cajiao I hope I said it right the second time co founder and chief growth officer at Torre.co. Andres co authored the book remoter after selling his Social Media Marketing Agency. And he pivoted into years of social media experience to build a next generation job finding and recruiting network called Tori. So Andres and I were on a panel together, he has an intense passion for making work fulfilling. And he brings that passion for that and remote to his company Torre. So I thought he would be the perfect person to chat about what it takes to go remote and how candidates can really stand out in today's atmosphere. So Andres, thank you so much for being here.

Man, thank you so much for the invitation and for the very good introduction and pronunciation of my name.

Yay. Cool. So just like in a minute or two, tell our audience about Tori.

So Ray is a company that started a little bit more than two years ago with the mission of making work fulfilling for everyone. This is is originally started as an experiment or a series of experiments that my co founder Alex, Tora, Mengele was running within his past company, bunny studios. But a studio is a company that it's a multimillion dollar marketplace that connects creative talent with professional opportunities on real time and gets the job done. So essentially, you put a credit card you you tell buddy students what you need to get done, whether it's a video, a translation, an article, or a voiceover, and they get it done within minutes or hours depending on the scope of the project without much hassle. So on top of that AI that he had built for this specific meat, he started experimenting with some things and eventually he decided to to structure a company around that, which is sort of a third of the company that we are right now. And I joined him a little after that, to start figuring out the easiest path for growth or the fastest possible path for growth. In this very challenging environment recruiting is an industry that is very challenging. There's a lot of companies trying to build things here. LinkedIn is a very big competition. But we're trying to build something that is useful for everyone and we have been focused on remote for the board since the beginning for the last two years or so. Which now makes us the largest aggregator for Remote Jobs and largest market days for remote talent owners.

Okay, so how do you guys like how do you guys think about yourself positioned versus some of the maybe remote for Scopus job boards like we work remotely or SEO? How you guys are how are you guys differentiated? I know there's a lot more going on with what you're doing.

Of course, yeah. So first of all, those shoppers I mean, they by definition, they are just drop off that's it. I mean, it's a place where you go and it's like a it's like a virtual, you know, board with with, with with postings that are instead of being in paper Olympians or reposts. It's their online that's it. It's limited to that. They try For the visibility that they have, you know, we were remotely I think it's more than a million bits per month I think they have. And and but that's that's pretty much what you get What you see is what you get. And if you go and see we were removed the I don't know now but like a couple of months ago, they were having about 50 new job postings per week, I think was in a month or a month, I keep forgetting the ranges. But we're talking about a number that is, you know, significantly low compared to 1 million visits where you have 1 million professionals trying to find Remote Jobs, you have 50 jobs being posted. Not gonna be enough. So just from a voting perspective, Torah is a platform that has thousands of job postings, remote job postings being added every week, on every level on the platform, and that's something you can you can go and search and prove for yourself. So I would say just from that perspective, we are we are definitely well beyond. But more importantly, as you were saying, we're way more than just a job work right and I can go on and on what we are but reality is and when you're building a startup, you want to go as specific as possible. And you want to hone in into an a specific problem as much as you can. So you can build true to that. But the reality is that when you're trying to build a marketplace, when you're trying to build a system, when you're trying to build an operating system, when you're trying to replace the status, cool, especially in recruiting, it's not just one magic, you know, bullet that you that you have to build on. That said, there's a series of systems that have to be replaced in order for you to be able to be successful in building program while we call programmatic recruiting. And we're talking about starting from the CD, right? So the very first thing that we build was a new kind of professional curriculum, the tie, which is what we called back in the day, by or now we're calling it professional genome, but essentially is we completely rebuild the resume so that it will no longer be a couple of pages that said, you know, a couple of words that you beautifully typed them all yourself, but we need a structured database about you From your perspective, but also from the perspective of others, and also from the scientific perspective of the most recognized personality trait assessments and professional culture assessments that are out there. So, that is a, we will see that the basics of what we are and how we are different to the job boards out there.

Okay, and how so if someone goes on and signs up right now, how much has like, how much is that that bio that genome built out? Like how many different How much do they put in? Is it up to them? Like whether they put five data points or 500 What does that look nice? And then like, what's the goal because I I also noticed which I love you guys have your your roadmap linked pretty openly online.

Yeah. So the the roadmap, it's something that we have public because, I mean, we believe wherever fast, fast company, we're innovators and, you know, we know how to build fast Of course, there's gonna be companies that can go faster. But in the end, it's it's a venturing to new business and venturing to a business is a mix of, of course, your capacity to build your capacity to dream, your capacity to envision, and bring more importantly, your capacity to execute on those dreams. Right. So that's what we have in public. And within that there's a lot of things that we're building right now. Again, the bio, the original question regarding the genome, a very high percentage of, of the bio that is built based on what others others say about you. Interesting, because in essence, the best there's a there's a present in management leadership. And that is, if you want to know the performance of a person, all you have to do is ask their colleagues, that's it. Yeah. And you ask them, Hey, what do you think about this guy? What do you think about his work? What do you think about or this guy, you know, her work and how she's performing and very judicious with the culture, and you ask enough people and you're gonna get, you're gonna get the feedback that you need, but the top That's not destructured that is not public that is not consumable by by AI. So genome is something that we build on top of these idea of how do we go How do we get those out of points out of people in a you know, way that is as natural as possible, but at the same time that allows AI to consume it and then and then of course use it for different purposes. Right now we're focused on matching professionals with jobs with more Remote Jobs. But as you can imagine, there's several there's a lot of opportunity behind that Yeah, they'd be behind. That's that's that's pretty much what we what we have right now and what people are starting to use a lot. What so what came first writing remoter or starting Tory, they became pretty closely together. But I'd say I'd say the rhetoric in first. remoter really is is remoter happens when we noticed that humanity does not know How to recruit. And he man, he does not know how to work remotely. And I say humanity with intention because we went out there trying to consume structured and sophisticated knowledge about this things because we were trying to build a company around it. And we couldn't find it. I mean, yeah, we could read Basecamp rework, and we could read base camps, or 32 signals, a remote office not required. And we could read a couple more books about it. But we ended up not finding anything that satisfy us and our audience and the people we interviewed the people we've talked about, in regards to how to build and scale remote teams. So we ended up doing an MVP, which took more than a year write that book. It's not easy. It's not easy at all. But we decided to do it because because of that, because it through the process of building the product. We understood that there was not enough structured knowledge about the topic, and we saw it as an opportunity for us to consolidate our IDs. But and also share them with others.

And is the book is the book the website are they kind of interchangeable?

Well so the website remoter calm it started as a, as a library, we're writing articles, and we were, you know, producing a pot, we had a couple of seasons of our podcasts, or video interviews and so on. But now we're going to revamp it. And as we speak, we're doing this so that the book is at the center of it. And then all these different articles and videos and the video courses and so on. They are part of the experience of learning how to go remote, how to build remote teams, but the focus is on I think, I think that reading and books in general have are the fastest more efficient way for you to learn the topic. But of course, we all learn in different ways, right? We some people like podcasts, like videos, like, you know, reading articles, so we decided to build an entire ecosystem that now we're kind of shifting into having the book being at the center, have it.

Got it. Okay, cool. So that actually leads into some of the questions I had to ask you Specifically kind of candidate focus, because what I'm writing right now with going remote is really exactly what you said. It's crazy how little information and step by step literature there is to help people understand not only how to work remotely, but even more specifically for what I'm focused on, is how to make that shift to remote and get hired. I mean, I think, again, recruiting is broken traditionally. But especially with remote recruiting. It's so interesting, because there are so many more applicants coming at the top of the funnel. People want to make that shift, but they don't necessarily know how to successfully. So just the first question I'd love to ask you is, what is the biggest mistake that you see remote candidates make? And I kind of broke that into two things like first and the initial application process. And then second part would be like later in the process, Once there, you know, a few interviews in

Yeah, I think it Hands on stage of the candidate and kind of like their their professional seniority, I would say, okay, you allow me. I think that the bed, Okay, first of all 55% or more of positions are fulfilled through referrals globally, there's yet this effect. So the fact that you think that by going to a job where you're going to get hired, you're already on the wrong side of history, right? You're on the, on the losing side of the bat. And so just to get started, we need to think of job hunting or finding or building your professional career more than job hunting as a continuously evolving effort. They have to do that, in some cases, or in most cases, it's not a conscious effort that you do. But that definitely has a lot to do with how you build your network, how you position yourself as a professional, how you how you go after what you want in life, and I think I feel like that last part is definitely the most relevant one because the majority of people don't know what they want. And they don't know how to find those answers, right? So, so they kind of like, go with the flow, right? They go on the study of bachelor's and marketing, and then they come out of it and they do an internship at PepsiCo, or at Procter and Gamble, and then they move on to a, you know, Junior role. And then they go into a mid level role and then the senior role, but they never really, like start to determine, okay, what do I want to get out of my life, my professional career, and this is just the vast majority of people from what we've seen. So the very first mistake that many professionals committed and I have committed as well, you know, I've rolled with a flow a lot and I feel like so long, you understand that it's part of the process and that you have kind of like a, like an understanding that that that going with the flow is not necessarily the best way to grow professionally. It's okay to quote unquote, make that mistake. But it's really important to somehow figure out okay, how do I see the path through which I want my career to go to grow? And that is a question I feel like we all have to ask ourselves, yeah. So once you have that, once you have the path that you see, like right now, I professionally envision a path for myself. And I'm like, okay, there's certain milestones that I have to achieve in order to grow professionally. This is the kind of knowledge that I have to acquire in order to be what I want to be. This is the kind of connections I have to make in order to be where I want to be. So that kind of allows me to move forward through through the process in a more conscious way, not necessarily controlled way because I can control the future, I can control many externalities, but I can definitely be conscious about what I want to get done. And I feel I feel like that is the number one mistake is not being conscious about the process that you're going to go through. And so you see a lot of candidates that they go to job boards, and they start triggering and applying to just ask jobs get ops massively upon, and they don't even know and I saw I think I saw this was a tweet or something. A candidate and the guy seemed to be doing a very conscious approach like he had all these these It seems about his job hunting and so on. And like, I'd like to apply to like 168 jobs you heard before getting hired. And he showed a flows and what he did and the process that ended up and in remote reality is just because of how its structured. If you go with a job board approach, you're going to have to apply to a lot of jobs before you get interviewed before you get you know, past that because you're competing with a global talent pool. So the number one the number two mistake if you allow me is it after after not making a conscious approach to job hunting in from my perspective is job hunting without an unfair advantage? And an entire Vantage you could consider it, for example, your net worth would be an unfair advantage, your specific set of skills and how you market them to be an unfair advantage. Your industry or a of expertise and how you frame it could be an unfair advantage. But that's definitely that's it. You You come to me if you come to me and email me, and I've had tons of people through I'm very active on Instagram. I've had tons of people write to me on Instagram or email me, being Hey, hire me. I'm like, Okay, what are you good at? And then mark getting like, yep, marketing is huge man. What are you good at within marketing? No, you know what I know how to do Google ads and Facebook ads. Okay, go to go to go to Upwork or not even that go to today. and search for Google ads or search for Facebook ads, go and see how many professionals are proficient in Google ads or Facebook ads. You know, we're talking about millions of people, right? So if you don't know how to frame yourself, you don't know how to. If you don't know how to position yourself, it's gonna be really hard. And this is something that happens to a lot of professionals that have this that may have this close or maybe very close to having the skills necessary for a remote job, but they don't know how to market it. Right. And if you are, because they don't know the lingo, because they don't know it's like, it's like me going to the US administer, he'll go into the US. I am Latina, I'm from Colombia, and English is not my first language and And I wasn't I didn't grow up with the with the, with the US with a US centric culture. I grew up with my culture like I know, I love j balvin. And I dance to him and so on. I don't dance to I don't know, you guys dance to Drake or whatever. I can't see that again, right? So I went. So I go to the US, I go to the clubs, and I don't know how to dance and I don't know how to what they drink. And I don't know what they saying what they like to hear. I went to a party, I was living in San Francisco for two years, I went to a bunch of clubs there, and I was like, Whoa, you dance that and people were dancing.

It's kind of like you're the Columbian in the middle of San Francisco. A party and it's like you know, you can go and you can have some fun but you don't you don't you don't blend well unless you know what's up. So when going remote there is this whole subculture remote isn't so culture and and how we work and the systems we use and the platforms we use and how we talk is different from us.

Remote software media and if you notice language pretty much is language and culture. It's like a I call it remote fluency. It's like how do you you know how, yeah, that's that's a really I like that.

I like that example in that visual, you know, like when I go to Tokyo I'm just like, whoa, such a different culture. And it's the same as in some ways it's shifting from an in office culture where you are in your cubicle, you have your manager you have your in person meetings, and then going completely remote and it's just like all right now this is a it's a different world. It is I feel like I feel like it's a different world but I feel like it's one that we all want to to learn from. I feel like like any culture, even if you don't want to go and do it, like any culture, any religion, any any food taste, if even if you don't want to like embrace it, knowing about it is yes, you can learn from it. Yeah, having the knowledge definitely So your original question was number one mistake. I ended up with two mistakes. Yeah, and a lesson about culture. But sorry about that.

But that's perfect. That's really good. And I agree with you 100%. One of the so as I'm writing this book, one of the largest, the largest section is it, which I didn't plan on is around discovery. And that's discovering what really drives you your career drivers, your personal core values. And then how do you take like, what you're good at? And I call it your triple threat, which is a theater and sports thing. And then how do you apply it to your market? And I think that is the biggest thing that people miss exactly what you said. They're just like, Okay, cool. I am good at operations. I'm just going to go try to get any kind of operations jobs versus being like, you know, what, I have a lot of experience in remote and building distributed teams. I'm good at operations, but then I have this experience, but I'm also very interested in systems and like, you know, building things that are scalable and overlapping that in a way where Like, I would come to you guys and say, Hey, you are going to explode in the number of people in your core team, but also in your larger community over the next five years. Have you set up the scalable people systems to blah, blah, blah, which is so different than just like, Hey, I'm good at operations, you should let me help you. It's just like crafting our own stories, which is the Yeah, we haven't been set up for it. So then I guess the next shift is like, what are the top skills that you that you look for in a candidate today? And honestly, like, regardless of if they're if you're hiring for marketing, engineering operations, what are the soft or hard skills that you think people really need to be remote fluent?

Yeah. So in regards to the last statement you made, I feel like it's very important to understand that remote, remote talent going remote. It's not about having different kind of hard skills like of course, because of the natural expansion of remote. The most companies that have remote teams are startups building digital products, right. And so of course, the hard skills required to build a startup. It's it, there's a series of hard skills that are very related to that like software engineering, like product design, like marketing, like customer success, sales, etc. and but within that, there's a very important distinction about job hunting and upon the remote, which is the best jobs are not posted anywhere, the best jobs are created. They are for you, they are created around you. you collaborate with the company in creating the best jobs, right. And this is something and this is something that is very, very important to make a distinction which is I feel like there's two kinds of professionals, the one that can create jobs for them and the ones that can't. So you can create a job for yourself. It's because you have a level of proficiency in a series of skills. And you have a level of initiative. But more importantly of accountability, of determination of self drive, of self motivation, that allows the company to feel comfortable making you an offer, word within the within the context of what you want to do, and what you envision for the company. Right. So just recently, this week, we were chatting with a candidate. This is a person that has been a mentor to me for the past couple of years, while working at doTERRA. This is someone that had met my co founder many years ago and who my co founder knew of this is a person that I have the utmost respect for all things related product. And, and you know, we talked with God for a couple of weeks and we're going back and forth and I be eating What kind of job was one that would make him comfortable but not not really comfortable in the way that he will come in and make chill, but comfortable in the sense that he will come in and have everything to be successful. And at the same time will allow us to move forward in the goals that we have. And we literally build the job around the guy was doing the talks, we haven't signed on anything. But the point is, we the the founders of the company are taking the time to build this job around the person because it's someone that we didn't do with every candidate we do. And this is very important about recruiting and this every every remote company that has its own, you know, workflow for recruiting, they do their own personality tests or their own set of interviews or their own professional culture assessment or their own psychometric, whatever it is, they do their own process. With this guy. We did not do any process. There was no need for us there was no need for personality trait has been edited. We know who he is. Right? And we have the fortunate to know this kind of people. We've been out there, networking and working with people and to do that. He is fortunate or you know he is in a position where he can get founders to making proposals and build and co create the job bro with the roll with with with you. So I feel like in regards to your question, the most important skills for golden remote are precisely related to this taking initiative, to dis accountability to this self drive self motivation to this discipline that you have to have. working remotely it's not just about working from home is all the infrastructure that is built around the concept of you haven't the liberty to work at whatever hours you want to work, whatever place you want to work, you know, whenever you want to work and, and build this work life integration, which is what we push a lot in our book. That at the end, if you don't have the accountability if you don't have the adaptability if you don't have the discipline and the self motivation and self drive necessary for you to succeed. Well, you will fail It has nothing to do with your hard skills. Of course, you know, there's a bias because of this tech startup during the the most prominent remote hires. Um, but definitely I feel like the focus has to be on this series of soft skills that I just mentioned.

I couldn't agree more.

Okay, here's a kind of slightly out of right field or left field, I forgot how you're saying, I'm really bad at sports ball. So if you weren't co founder head of growth at Torrey, and you had to find work in today's economy, and this might just be literally exactly what you said. But I'm just curious, like, how would you What would you do? Like if tomorrow? You were starting from scratch and like, yeah, what would your process be?

Um, so unfortunately for your question, I'm an intrapreneur. I was born intrapreneur before thought I had my own company. So yeah, but let's assume that for whatever reason I can I can build a business. I don't know. I don't bankruptcy, and I can set up a new business or whatever. Let's assume I have to find a job. Yeah. If I had to find a job, the number one thing I would do is I would hone in into what is this? What is the industry? What is the set of skills? What is the mission that I'm looking to support and that I'm looking to integrate with. And then within that, I will figure it out, I will build a plan to understand Okay, these are the companies that fit the criteria of what I'm doing. And this, these are the current stages of this companies, whether they're funded or they are bootstrap. There's other current This is their income. This is where they want to go with with their business from what I've seen on Twitter of what their use is, man you research I mean, you approach it, you're approaching it like an entrepreneur.

Like a marketer, would you yeah, and what what what I am, but definitely and what everyone needs to be a little bit, right.

Yeah, I feel like the pump, the largest problem that we have In the job marketplace in the in the professional environment is that the people that get hired are not necessarily the best of their jobs as the ones that can market themselves the best, right? Totally. And that is really that he's not good at all. Because like, if you need a software engineer, if you need a product designer, if you need, there's so many roles, that you absolutely do not need the person to have any skills in marketing whatsoever. And that because they are not good at marketing, you end up being persuaded, but someone that may be a little bit more of a marketer, maybe we'll have more of a salesman. But salesman's aren't the sales people are only not all, but you want salespeople when you want to use salespeople, you're looking for an interview for any game like you don't need them to be the best have the best restroom. And so that's kind of the challenge that we're trying to tackle with. And we've done it with like in principle, like in principle, recommendations of Dora you cannot write recommendations. on LinkedIn, you can go and write whatever you want and that is the best person to work with. And people are going to You know, assess you based on those recommendations, although you can't and Why? Well, because we don't want those recommendations to become something that is that it's, in a way not quantifiable in a way not fair game for everyone. Right? So when you when you strip the I don't know how you say, Colin, can you give me one second be without it's the word in Spanish. Let me say this. Let me look for the word in English and be witty. Yeah. When you strip the ambiguity out of recommendations. And you and you turn them into a very objective, not subjective.

Then you can assess people objectively, because if you base your assessment on subjective things, then your assessment is subjective, right? It's not objective and when hiring someone to be as objective as possible. So if I want if I if I want to To find a job, I will definitely have to build my quote unquote marketing plan, try and understand my segment, there is a very good, there's a very good sales principle. And that is, the number one job of a Salesman is not to go and find, to go and sell the product to anyone and everyone, the number one job of the salesman is to find the people who are ready to buy and present a solution to them. Find the people who are in my value, the first job of a salesman. If a person is not ready to buy, it doesn't matter. You could have the best solution in the world. They're not going to buy, you know, that's brilliant and applying it to the job search, find the companies that are ready to hire and need that.

And this is something we've done. we've experimented with this. That's really good. We've had friends of ours that we did this with friends just because it was an experiment, but we've had friends who like we're coming out of Venezuela and they had no money and they had no connections and they have no knowledge. That's some English that's it. And we and we reach out to companies that were in need that we thought were in need of customer success. These are startups between their seed and their series A or between there's pre seed and there's Tuesday, very early on companies, and we reach out to them. With an introduction, well not wait like, we help the candidate reach out to them and be like, Hey, I am seeing you as I've grown a lot. I love your website or when you're doing these in these not an area of expertise of mine, but this is something I want to learn more about. I will be willing to work for you for free doing customer success for 15 days for a month, no charge. And the company these are these are Canadian based startups. So US based startups are European based startups. But you know what, we do need a lot of help with customer success. How do you know well of course I know because you're in the middle of growing between pre seed and series A you have you you're building a lot of things and other things are blowing up and we see how your growth loops and we see how your analytics of your website Do we know that you're growing You need customer success. So that's something every company, almost every company meets. Right? So the so the Venezuelan person reaches out and says, you know, I'm gonna work for one month for free. And they weren't for my one more for free and it's not even one month in a couple of days, the company goes, you know, once a year, so, we need it. Some of the best hires I've ever made have done that. And I've done that when I was early on. I've started businesses doing that say, hey, like that. So I don't it might be an American thing. It might be a global thing, but it's the idea of like the first one's always free. Actually, I think it came from like a bad thing. I think it came from like drug pushers they were like, Oh, that's great. But whatever same same, but that was I would literally when I didn't have any experience I would be like, I will build you a page of your your website or I will build you I'll build out your Twitter or something. This was years ago when everything was super new, and no businesses had websites or Twitter's. And Twitter's Twitter's whatever, and I would build it out And then they get one thing and I'd be like, here you go totally free on me. But if you need more support, let me know. And I think it's the concept of showing your work like that pairs with objectivity. You know, you can, I'm always hesitant because I'm not a good marketer salesperson. And there are people that are phenomenal at it, but I'm always like, ah, like, are they just selling me? But then you show me your actual work and boom, like, That's amazing. This has been super, super great, Andrea. So just in the last few minutes, we have few questions I wanted to ask is high level, with COVID-19 still consuming so much of our global mind share? I know South America is getting hit hard. In the US, we just keep rolling back into it. But what are the and this sounds bad to say but I always look at situations like this, like, what are the opportunities zones, what are the silver linings that that individuals or companies can at least focus their energy on, you know, versus just kind of admiring and like everything is shit.

Hmm. Well, that's a that's a very good question. And yeah, definitely COVID-19 is something that has changed us a lot. I feel like there's kind of, there's kind of two is it's kind of binary. Either you go and build something that people need right now. And we're talking about people they need, there's a lot of need for food at home, there's a lot of need for experiences at home, there's a lot of need for emotional support, there's learning for many things that are a result of this. So you can go and build that and you can go on after that. From the most basic levels, you can go and become an instacart, you know, driver and delivery person to the most, you know, philosophical thing, question and, you know, you can go and do innovative meditation sessions to help people reach a flow state at home. And, and that's something definitely something that I did. So that's one thing. And then the other thing if you can't do that, or you're not to do that, or even have the resources to do that, the second best thing you can do is learn Right now it's an amazing time to go and learn and build a set of skills skill sets, because let's face it the majority of people are at home they're not spending as much money there's a lot of government money for getting flown into into into people. I mean, I don't know in your case or the US but I've seen there's a lot of in Canada I have a couple of friends are getting thousand dollar checks in the mail just because just because. So in in Colombia, you know, the most vulnerable vulnerable populations are getting checks as well. So like any if not, you know, this is the person time or excuse for you to get up for you to get alone or get a friend to help you out or go back without family.

Yep, exactly. Whatever it is. Just learn and learn. Totally, that's so true. Heck, I'm, I'm recording this from my childhood bedroom. I've been here for like four months, my lease ended in Manhattan and I was like, why I was like, and it's amazing. I've never spent so little money but it's great. Like it's it's learning. It's creating. It's like this is the time to do that. Okay, last questions. What is your favorite book or podcast from the last year?

My favorite book book or podcast from last year? Well, I'd say that powerful Padma chord is a book that I really, really enjoyed. And it's a powerful by Patti McCord. She She used to be the leader of I don't know if its culture of people. Yeah, I think she still is or something. And she basically outlines the principles. And the reason why it's one of my favorite books, it's because it just puts into a structure works, everything that I've always thought about how to build a business. But more importantly, it proves that you can build a billion dollar businesses around those principles, like very basic things that I've never liked it when I joined when I drink Gatorade, for the first time, it was still an experiment within body studies, right. So we had to adhere to the company culture, and the company culture was like, I need to buy, you know, Zapier for $9 99 per month, I have to go and make an amendment under request and send a form and it didn't have to find things and get a credit card. And I was like, No, I'm not doing this. I was like, Alex, give me your credit card. And I started using Alex's credit card. And I wouldn't ask anyone for permission, I would just go and and people were like, under, but you need to understand there's a process find those doo doo doo doo doo. I was like, No, this makes no sense. And when they read the book, that's a practice Netflix does like Netflix, he literally gives you a credit card with the company money and like, go do your thing. I mean, if you get this $9 you know, saturd thing? Well, you need it. I mean, go buy it. And we'll we know you'll take care of your company's money. And we'll trust you with that. And they actually run the experiments and saw that people were not misusing the company credit card means using the funds of the company. And then it was it was rather but its own mentality, right? Um, how do you build teams that can go fast? how you build cultures that can grow fast, so I read the book.

Okay, second question. It could be either software or hardware. What is a product or tool that you can't live without when it comes to remote work?

Product or tool that I can't there's a lot. Well, there's not that many. I mean, but I feel like definitely my air pods, especially this one. I was gonna say the same thing. Yeah, I mean, was it worth the money? Yeah. And I personally, I was really hesitant like we were talking about expensive piece of equipment here, but they're very important. I feel like for remote work my webcam as well. So I have a standing desk. I'm actually looking at it. It's a very cheap standing desk that I built. But it has the basic you know, a 4k screen 27 inch screen about what a webcam on it. Keyboard trackpad, that's kind of the basics, right, but but I can't I feel like I can't live without my earplugs.

Awesome. Okay, that literally would be the same one.

I would say right now I'm just thinking that. Okay, last How can people find out more about you about you know, what are on the interwebs? What can they search and we'll include all of this in the show.

Notes, of course, so I feel like the best way to learn about both Orianna is by going to my bio. So it's Torres biota rates to RR e bio bio slash AC. So because because I co founded the company I can get cool a cool username and I'm seeing here right now.

Yeah, so there you have my Instagram my my what my Twitter like I feel, I think and you can at the same time explore what a bio looks like. I haven't feel like I haven't updated you know, either in a couple of weeks, but it has a lot of structure information about myself and then you can go on from there and explore it.

I love it. Thank you so much, Andres. This was great.

Man, thank you so much for having me. It was a it was a great conversation. Inde on air is brought to you by inde.co the first remote focused, professional network and sponsored by going remote the ultimate step by step Guide to finding and landing a meaningful remote job in today's environment. Preorder today you'll get exclusive bonuses and access, just check out going remote book.com that's going remote book.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai