Dear prospective investor,
Before you read any further, I want to be direct with you about the most important thing: the outcome of your investment in Torre is likely to be binary. You will either make significant returns or you will lose your money entirely. It is unlikely to be much in between.
You might reasonably assume that being a Shark on Shark Tank and having built successful companies of my own, tilts the odds in my favor. It does. A founder with that track record is more likely to build a successful startup than someone attempting it for the first time. But I want to be clear-eyed with you: Torre is not your average startup. It is far more ambitious and far harder than most, for reasons I will explain. My experience improves our chances. It does not guarantee them.
I say this not to discourage you, but because you deserve the truth. I have been an investor for many years. Some of my investments happened in the public eye through Shark Tank; many more I have made directly and indirectly, outside of that platform and away from the cameras. Across all of them, the pattern is the same: the vast majority do not return their investors’ money. Even businesses that go on to become genuinely successful rarely deliver a meaningful financial return. Only a small minority produces the kind of outsized outcomes that make this kind of investing worthwhile.
Yet despite having a diversified portfolio built over many years, I have chosen to concentrate my time, my energy, and a significant portion of my personal wealth into building Torre. Why would I abandon diversification for a single bet?
Because even though the odds of success are low, the potential outcomes, if we succeed, could be outsized in ways that matter to me far beyond financial returns.
On risks and returns
Network effect businesses are extraordinarily difficult to launch. They require sustained investment, relentless execution, and often years of struggle before they reach critical mass. Torre operates in a market with very strong, well-resourced competitors, and it will take a great deal of capital and a great many believers to break through. Even with unlimited resources, we might not succeed. But once a network effect business does take off, it becomes very difficult to displace. The defensibility is remarkable, and the returns, if they materialize, can be transformative. I know this firsthand, because I have built two successful businesses of exactly this kind. Their financial success is what allowed me to become an investor in the first place.
What makes Torre different in scale is the size of the prize. We are not building a niche product; we are aiming to become the largest job network that has ever existed, addressing a total market of roughly $690 billion per year.3 A target that large changes the math. If we succeed, the outcome could be very large, precisely because the opportunity is so large and so defensible once won. That potential is inseparable from the risk. The same ambition that makes the upside enormous is what makes the odds long. This is a higher-risk, higher-reward proposition than most, and I want you to see both sides of it clearly. Nothing I say here is a prediction of returns; most startups fail, and you could lose everything you invest.
On social impact
In Silicon Valley and around the world, I have watched tens of thousands of brilliant minds pour their talent into extracting value rather than creating value. Consider one example: they optimize which advertisement you see next on your feed, while the technology to give job applicants real feedback, rather than letting their applications vanish into a black hole, already exists but has never been built at scale. At Torre, we are using artificial intelligence not simply to replace people’s work, but to help people find work that better realizes their potential and maximizes the fulfillment they get from their careers.
This is also where my deepest personal conviction lives. Our company is named after my grandmother, María Emma Torrenegra, a brilliant and determined woman who was boxed out of the careers she deserved by the discrimination of her era. Her only options were homemaker or secretary, and I still think often about who else she might have become. She is the reason discrimination is the enemy Torre exists to defeat. Her full story is worth reading: María Emma’s story.
Discrimination in hiring is not only unjust; it is a waste of human potential on an enormous scale, and it is a problem AI is unusually well-suited to help solve. Humans are prone to subconscious bias, and roughly half of hiring managers admit to it.1 AI can be designed to avoid those instincts. At Torre, during pre-screening, our system is designed to put every professional on equal footing: name, gender, race, and age are ignored, and people are matched on merit and fit rather than on the accidents of who they are. The evidence for this approach is compelling; in a landmark study of blind orchestra auditions, the likelihood of women being advanced rose by 25 to 46 percent.2 Used this way, AI can make recruitment not only more accurate, but more human and more fair. You can read more about how we do it here: more accurate recruitment.
I’m deeply committed
I am pushing hard to make Torre successful. I bring my skills, my connections, my capital, and my energy to this mission.
But a mission this large is not won alone. We already have more than a million users and many passionate fans helping us grow, along with investors who have real skin in the game. Every day, we get messages from our users thanking us for the positive impact Torre has had on their lives. Yet, the next chapter calls for even more believers: people who choose to stand with us and take this on together. Building a network effect business at a global scale requires not just capital, but conviction.
More believers, combined with excellent execution, will not guarantee our success. Nothing can. But it meaningfully improves our odds. That is why we are opening this round to our community.
About your investment
You are not just investing money. You are investing in a future where work is more meaningful, where discrimination is fought at scale, and where artificial intelligence serves humanity.
You should only invest an amount that you can afford to lose entirely, and only if you believe in this mission. Even if Torre does not succeed as a business, we will have helped shape the future of work, and that impact alone should be a return that makes you proud of the choice you made. And if, in addition to that, we succeed as a business, then you will have been an owner from the beginning.
Come build the future with us.
With conviction,
Alexander Torrenegra
Founder @ Torre.ai
Notes
- In a widely cited compilation of hiring research, 48% of HR managers acknowledged that bias affects which candidates they choose (Zippia, “Hiring Bias Statistics”).
- The 25 to 46 percent range comes from Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse’s landmark study of blind orchestra auditions (Princeton and Harvard, 2000).
- Mordor Intelligence, Recruiting Market report.
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