domino.vote’s Optimistic Wishes for the New Decade

We talked to Ray Chow-Toun of domino.vote about online voting and he had the following to say about it.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Ray Chow-Toun: We are ready for any vaccine when available. My 3 young kids all had chickenpox last weeks. Fortunately, everything is fine now. 

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded domino.vote.

Ray Chow-Toun: I worked for Silicon Graphics (the Netscape founder’s first unicorn) a while ago, and I stopped my consulting work in Swiss private banking in 2017 to develop my current projects in trust computing, i.e. including voting, digital notarization and a new IdAM approach that we are currently developing. 

How does domino.vote innovate? 

Ray Chow-Toun: Like many startups, we were initially obsessed with the blockchain new horizon, which finally represents roughly only 10% in our domino.vote leading product. 

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Ray Chow-Toun: Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were already a distributed team on minimum 4 time zones, intensively using every day video conferencing and other online collaborative tools. Nothing has changed except that now we hear people complaining about an organization of work that we love from the beginning of our venture. 

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Ray Chow-Toun: We develop tools such as domino.vote which can help people continue organizing professional votes, for example. Our main concern is more about some possible improvements in our products so that they will continue to be very useful to our users even when the pandemic will be fully under control.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety?

Ray Chow-Toun: We see real tragedies around like in catering or in aviation. We understand that agility is one of the main mindset to develop in all circumstances. 

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Ray Chow-Toun: Our main competitors are remote voting solutions. But we do not plan to compete against the remote voting providers only, but we aim to deliver a universal voting solution no matter if it’s for onsite or remote or hybrid voting, a new concept that we call Elastic Voting. 

Your final thoughts?

Ray Chow-Toun: The traditional resistance to change in our society made 2020 much more difficult than it could be. It’s time to evolve including during “peace-time”. 

Your website?

https://www.domino.vote/