We recently connected with Jordan J. Dominguez and have shared our conversation below.

Jordan J., appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about making remote work effective.

Although the three TimeAlign co-founders are long-time friends and lived in San Diego for the majority of the time working on the project so far, we have always built the business with the intention of it being not just remote-friendly, but remote-first.

We don’t set geographic OR working hour constraints on our teams, and instead opt for primarily asynchronous communications – alongside a cadence of minimal-yet-effective synchronous meetings, utilizing AI and a number of other digital tools and technology to help optimize our operations.

We are designing the business as a modern, internationally distributed, digitally-empowered “results-focused” culture from the get-go, focusing heavily on how best to construct a resilient and anti-fragile operational structure.

There are a few reasons for this:

First, we believe that the organization that we create, much like the TimeAlign technology that we are building, should be a vehicle for living an “ideal life”, and that goes for our users and our employees as much as it does ourselves.

Second, we see first-hand – and understand deeply – that the world is shifting in this globalized direction already.

Over the past few years, I have gotten heavily involved in online business communities (a few favorites, Marc Randolph’s Neverland entrepreneurship group, and the Furlough online business community, both on Discord).

Through these networks, as well as the variety of projects I’m involved in, I have business partners, colleagues, employees, and friends all around the world. And I mean ALL around the world – on the average work day I usually work across 3 or 4 time zones.

I don’t think my experience is atypical these days, the world has become digitally connected and grows “smaller” – more connected – by the moment.

So I and the people I work with have always operated on a very timezone-agnostic and asynchronous basis.

This comes with its pros and cons.

The obvious pros – of course – are improved flexibility, enhanced freedom, increased employee agency, and last but oh-so-certainly not least – no commute.

As far as non-obvious benefits – I think one of the biggest is the shift in trust and accountability. When employees are given the opportunity to run their own work week as if they were entrepreneurs, they take on a different level of ownership for their results. Far from the “butts-in-seats” management mentality that has plagued corporate America for so long – we treat people like the adults they are, able to manage their own time the way they need to to get their work done.

By embracing remote work we feel we not only align with shifts in global work culture but we also allow ourselves to recruit and work with the best talent we can find – no matter where they reside, what culture or background they come from, or even what language they speak.

As mentioned, however, all things come with tradeoffs – the biggest cons of remote work primarily involve challenges in communication. Things like waiting for teammates to get back to you, or the ever-present challenge of finding meeting times that actually do work for everyone, without one timezone sacrificing sleep or shifting schedules and getting up in the middle of the night. Adaptability is key.

Another challenge myself and my exec team are discovering – when your employees are all around the world and working at all different times… then… so are you. We field messages, meetings, and calls at all times, on most days.

Finally, it is also much harder to build and maintain company culture when you don’t have the option to come together in person. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that the playbook for building remote culture isn’t yet written – these more major shifts in global operations have only occurred somewhat recently, and so a lot of the strategies and tactics that may have worked in the “in-office” era don’t always port over well to the digital one. There is no water cooler to gather around, no Friday team luncheons, or post-work happy hours.

However – like most things in life, with a bit of forethought, some well-thought-out strategy, open/honest communication, and a healthy dose of trial and error, anything is possible. We move forward as a team, and learn together how best to collaborate and support one another.

I have always believed in solving things with a little bit of research, a lot of planning, and then a LOT of empiricism. Aka testing things by… testing things!

You can often improve a system significantly just by using it, so long as you are paying attention – keeping at least one hand on the wheel, and one eye on the road.

This brings me to a HUGE note in the TimeAlign story – our team recently relocated our HQ to Bali, Indonesia for a few months to do just that – test things out. We are moving to align our timezones a little bit better with our devs and cut our cost of living as we prepare for and launch TimeAlign, but also in a very real way, we are testing the “anti-fragility” of our systems/operations, seeing where the cracks begin to form so we can fill the seams, strengthen the scaffolding, and create a foundation to scale upon.

All in all, we will always be a remote-friendly organization, and we will continue to look for ways to collaborate effectively, moving forward productively no matter where on Earth we’re located. Autonomy to manage your own schedule is freeing and empowering, and if you have the right team, it leads to better work, better results, and perhaps most importantly, happier people.

Our brand is about doing the things you want, with the time you have, and we feel remote work allows for just that.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Absolutely – I’ll first lead by saying I have already written a bit about myself and my origin story in CanvasRebels’ sister publication, SD Voyager. You can check that article out here.

But with that being said, I’d love to expand a bit more:

How did you get into your industry/business/discipline/craft?

I got into my industry through a long and winding journey, outlined in the article mentioned, but the simple high level: I love to build. I love to create. I love to learn. And I love to envision and imagine all the what-ifs – then set about making those dreams reality.

In that sense, I’ve always found business to be one of the ultimate forms of creation.

Building an organization of people and systems and ideas that comes together to create something much, much larger than the sum of it’s parts can be a truly magical, and fulfilling, creative experience.

What type of products/services/creative works do you provide?

The main business I am working on is TimeAlign, a cross-platform time-optimization application aiming to help users align their daily lives with their long-term aspirations using AI and data-driven scheduling. We’re moments away from our official launch on the iOS app store, and may have actually launched by the time this article publishes.

Other than that, I keep myself pretty busy.

Aside from TimeAlign, I also own and operate a high-end home goods e-Commerce business, am working with a small team to launch a SaaS product that uses AI to derive insights from customer reviews, and I do photography when I find the time – shooting portraits, doing brand work, and selling travel and art prints on my website.

What problems do you solve for your clients and/or what do you think sets you apart from others?

With TimeAlign, the problem we are solving is the disconnect between the person you are today and the one you want to become. In a very real way, we are helping users collect data to build a better understanding about themselves, how their actions differ from their intentions, and then how to get a little bit better each week.

Compared to other similar solutions out there, we are one of the only businesses that focuses on the whole 24 hours of the clock, not just the 9 to 5. We feel there is more to life than optimizing your meeting times and fitting all your tasks in your day. We want to optimize your entire life – filling your tasks and your day with purpose, not just filling your day with tasks.

While optimizing for productivity and flow states are important and one part of the picture, TimeAlign specifically aims to optimize for fulfillment, purpose, and overall life/goal alignment.

What are you most proud of and what are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/your brand/your work?

I am most proud of our team, of our brand, and of our people-first values.

And while we’re not there yet with our launch (app store + product hunt launch coming later this quarter) I am incredibly proud of the work we are doing and the vision/world/future we are working towards.

We have just begun to get our ideas out there – and already I am receiving wonderful messages from interested users of all sorts speaking to just how wide-ranging and impactful our technology can be. People with learning disorders, parents with newborn children on the way, and ambitious busy folks with budding enterprises and lofty goals have reached out to express their excitement and desire for what we’re creating.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

My entire career has been pivot after pivot. I consider adaptability to be a core value – for myself personally and for my business organizations as a whole.

It’s been said before – the only constant is change, and those that are slow to adapt are quick to “die”.

I started off self-taught doing design work in high school – then realized quickly I disliked the subjectivity of design and hated doing client work (which hue of blue is good? better? best? Depends who’s asking!). I pivoted, and instead went to college for business, figuring I could use business skills in just about anything I wanted to, seeing as business was an underlying foundation to most things.

After graduation, I went into digital marketing at an agency called The Townsend Team, as well as worked at a seed-stage AI startup called Unanimous AI, primarily focused on user acquisition for their B2C platform.

At this point, it was more like I *was* pivoted, rather than I pivoted myself – the AI business shifted focuses to B2B clients and I was left with a much more minimal workload, and much more minimal hours.

Fortunately, I had been teaching myself to code to automate some of the marketing processes involved in that role, and realized I enjoyed software development so much that I then pivoted careers entirely – working part-time at the AI company while attending a full-time coding bootcamp, rebuilding my career as a software developer.

I worked as a software dev for the next 5 years, learning the ins and outs of building web-based software as well as dabbling in some small projects in firmware/hardware engineering and mobile development.

And then once more… some adjustments in my assigned workload left me feeling unfulfilled, and I lost all interest in my work. Literally all interest, and I could not for the life of me force myself to regain that interest.

This felt abnormal – to lose interest so aggressively – and I thought to myself that it was not going to be sustainable to keep switching careers every few years. Something was up.

A friend with ADHD, who also happened to be a therapist, had seen some “tell-tale” signs, and on her recommendation I looked into it.

This was how I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 28.

Being my usual self – I dove deep into researching ADHD, and through this research, my eyes were opened. So many things from my life made sense in retrospect, and I was suddenly handed an entire vocabulary of labels to layer upon my lived experience up until that point.

Amongst many other things, I learned from a video from leading ADHD specialist Dr. Russell Barkley that ADHD was “an interest-based nervous system.”

It was then that I realized what I had to do to be successful. I could never – and would never – be successful unless I pursued my own interests.

At this point, I laid out a long-term plan for how I would go about working for myself and began working on a side business (my eCommerce business) in the background. I did this while continuing to work 9-5 as a software engineer, working towards achieving escape velocity from my day-to-day job so I could pursue my own passions. This 7-9, 9-to-5, 5-to-whenever grind was one of the hardest, and most stressful, times of my life.

8 months after I started working on the side business, I made the leap, pivoting into full-time entrepreneurship.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

That being said, I’m sure that I’ll pivot again, in some respects. Whether it be a different target niche for TimeAlign, the next next evolution of my career down the line, or something completely unforeseen.

I believe that you never have it all right from the get-go – the future is unpredictable, and we’d be silly to think we knew it all.

With TimeAlign, we have a vision for the future we’re building – and we have a roadmap to get there. But we also have a community of intelligent, ambitious, and, perhaps most importantly, diverse perspectives – and I believe in strong opinions held loosely.

My game plan is to keep an open mind, charting course each day with the intention of pushing the boundaries, improving the world, and then adjusting as need be.

I’ve used the concept of “future me” a lot – future me knows best what future me wants to do. Present me can only do what’s best for him in this moment, and set that future version up as well as he knows how.

Whether we call it a pivot, remaining adaptable, or just dealing with the normal uncertainty of life, I have faith and trust in my future self to weather those obstacles and do what’s best.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I have two co-founders in this endeavor, Matty Reed, and Lucas Davila, both long-time friends.

Matty and I went to college together and met through a large group of mutual friends. We spent great times watching LA Clippers basketball games and “Cosmos” (both Carl Sagan’s AND Neil deGrasse Tyson’s), and took a higher level psychology class together while I pursued my minor in psychology and Matty audited/attended “for fun”.

Dropping into higher-level psych classes “for fun” should say enough about this man and his thirst for knowledge. He is one of the smartest, hardest-working people I know. The yin to my yang – and a tenacious force to be reckoned with that powers the engine behind our operations, as well as the aesthetics and usability of our product with a keen eye and attention to detail.

Lucas and I have also been friends since college, though instead through one of his brothers who attended Cal Poly. Lucas would come to visit, and through those experiences we became close.

After I had pivoted into software engineering and Lucas had graduated from CSU Long Beach with his degree in Computer Science, we spent a lot of time mind-melding on technical projects and problems.

When he joined the TimeAlign project running the technology side, I was immediately excited and felt a great balance had been achieved. While I have spent a little bit of time across a wide variety of domains and have a good balance of skills, one brain is never enough. Having smart teammates and partners to take ownership of pieces of the whole is necessary for long-term success, and these two gentlemen each provide unique, intelligent, and diverse perspectives that round our team out and lay the foundation for our phenomenal team culture.

I take my view on business partners and cofounders from Naval Ravikant – look for high intelligence, high energy, high integrity people to work with – and these fellas embody that to me.

It took me a long while in my career to learn those lessons (and a healthy dose of them the hard way, firsthand). Finding the right partners is never easy, and there is a fair amount of luck to be had on top of the hard work.

But in the end, it’s worth it. I couldn’t do it without these guys – or the other fine folks that I am lucky to be working with.

It’s just as they say – if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.

And we’re planning to go pretty far.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jordanjdominguez.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordanjdominguez
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanjdominguez/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jord4n_j
• Other: https://www.timealignapp.com/ https://www.instagram.com/timealignapp

Image Credits
Matty Reed, Alex Matacchieri, Alex Howard, Jordan Dominguez