Alex Torrenegra: "Sheer force of will"

Alex Torrenegra is the founder and CEO of Torre . He is also a frequent participant as a Shark (Investor) in both Shark Tank Mexico and Shark Tank Colombia. Previously he co-founded Voice123 , which he sold to Backstage and TA Associates and Bunny Studio. He and his co-founder wife bootstrapped both companies. He has invested in over 50 companies as an angel investor and is a big believer that we need more innovators and not entrepreneurs. Alex is from Colombia and came to the United States when he was 19. Alex started small businesses in Colombia, but it wasn’t until he met his wife and co-founder in the US that he scaled his first business.

Alex was born Alex Henriquez in Bogota Colombia. He would later change his last name to Torrenegra in honor of his maternal grandmother. When Alex was four, he visited his grandfather’s office and saw a computer for the first time. It was a Commodore 64 and his grandfather let him play a video game for a couple of minutes. He was immediately smitten.?

From that point forward, computers and technology were the only things he could think about. He asked his mother if she would help him buy one, but as a single mother, her office job was only enough for rent and to put food on the table - and sometimes not even for that. So whenever he would have a chance to speak with his father he would ask him if he could buy him a computer. After a year of pestering, his father finally told him, "if you get the best grades in your school, I will buy you a computer." Challenge accepted. For the next couple of years, Alex got close, coming in 2nd or 3rd in his school of 3,000 students, but never quite at the lofty target his father set. But when he was 6, in second grade, he finally achieved his goal. He asked his mother to try to get ahold of his father to relay the good news - it took a couple of months, and when he finally spoke to him on the phone, his father did not deliver on his end of the bargain.

Alex was like a dog with a bone. He would go to his mother’s office and try to use the computers there. He didn’t care that the computers didn’t have computer games - he just loved learning on these machines. He became an expert in Lotus123 and programming in Basic. When Alex turned 14, it occurred to him to start a small business that would give him enough money to be able to buy a computer and he would finance the purchase with a loan from the bank. He decided to start a transcription service - but first he needed to test if the idea had legs. Homework and important documents required that they be typed before they were submitted, but most kids in his school did not want to wait at the library to borrow the computer and most adults didn’t have access to one. He tested out the thesis by hanging signs for this soon-to-be transcription service and to his surprise, people started coming to his house asking for the service. At first, most prospective customers would walk away because they did not want a High School kid doing their work - so he started telling his customers that the business was his mom’s and she was out. Now he knew there was a market.

So on one of the infrequent outings to get ice cream with his family, he snuck away to the bank where he had a small savings account. He confidently walked to a bank teller and said that he was a customer and that he wanted a loan. The person laughed at him and said that they did not give loans to kids. Alex was crushed. But just then, a woman approached him and asked him to follow her to her office. She was the bank manager. She asked why he wanted the money, and Alex walked her through the story about how he used a computer for the first time and was starting a new transcription service. She was impressed and gave him forms to fill out. He returned the following day and the Bank Manager said that they would only be able to give him a one-year loan - instead of the two-year loan he requested. Alex immediately said yes. He figured that he would just work twice as hard in order to make enough money to pay for the computer. His business was successful and he paid off his loan. When he was going to make the final payment, the bank manager was no longer there, and to this day, Alex owes a debt of gratitude to the person who took a chance on him.

When Alex turned 19, he and his family left Colombia because of the drug violence in the country. They were able to get a visitor’s Visa to the US and so they moved to Florida. Eventually, his family returned to Colombia, but Alex was not going back. He enrolled in school and went through the alpha-numeric soup of Visas in order to be able to stay. At some point, he started a small business with a fellow student, and they were making a little bit of money, but not enough to be able to sponsor his Visa if he left school. At that point he met his now wife, Tania, and after a short courtship, they got married and moved to New York City. Tania was a voice actress and she found it difficult to find honest work - apparently, the voice world has many unscrupulous actors. So they had the idea of building a marketplace for Voice Talent to give talent more control of how and when they engaged with potential projects. They called the company Voice123. The company was profitable almost from day one, but that didn’t mean they didn’t face some resistance from the industry - maybe even some biased discrimination. Many of the talent managers and agents would use discriminatory tropes to discredit them. It was such a big problem that on their site, they anglicized their names. Working nights and weekends and bootstrapping the entire business, they grew it over the course of 20 years until they got to the point where they had over 100,000 voice talents on the platform and all of the major brands using them. At that point, a company called Backstage approached them to acquire the company. It was bittersweet - they were selling their baby, but they also knew that they had tapped out the potential growth opportunities.

Throughout the 20 years, Tania and Alex started other successful ventures like Bunny Studio and now Torre.ai . Alex has also been the longest standing Shark on the Colombian Shark Tank and over the last two years has also been a Shark on Mexico’s Shark Tank. Torre.ai is now Alex’s biggest bet - he raised capital, which Alex and Tania have matched one-for-one with their own investment. And the name… Torre.ai is an homage to his grandmother - the person that he credits to having the biggest influence. Totems are important to Alex, he actually has a replica of his first computer in his office. But in spite of all Alex's success, he still wants to push the limits and believe that there is even an opportunity to leverage technology to continue to protect democracy.