How to Invest in Yourself | Bitcoin, Education and Crypto: An Interview with Ameer Rosic

I do it for fun.

What is the best thing that's happened to you and affected you?

I'll tell you exactly what that is.

You've heard it here first on cointelegraph. Not that you need any introduction to who this man is when you look at the best explainer videos on the planet. But just for the folks that are new, just for the folks that don't know, would you please introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

My name is Amir Rosik. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I kind of stumbled on this industry about three years ago. I actually had an underwear company in Hong Kong, our neighbors over here. And I sold my shares for that. And luckily enough, I live in Toronto. We have a really robust blockchain community in Toronto. You know, we have a huge bitcoin crew over here. We have Hyperledger. And I'm lucky enough to know Vitalik's father, Dmitry, which is my business partner in Block Geeks. And basically my journey started off the exact same questions, like, where can I learn more about this stuff? All right, I understand technology. I'm not a developer, but I do understand technology. And the most common answer I got is, go to Reddit. I'm like, I fucking hate forums. I'm not going to Reddit. I'm not spending hours. I want someone to just tell me, right. Time is the most important thing to me. I want to conserve my time. And so I realized it didn't exist. I'm like, well, I gotta create my own. That's where Block Geeks comes from. And then I love. I love video. I love YouTubing. I've been doing that for like four or five years. And I just do it for fun. Like, people think, is that my. It's my professional thing. I'm like, that's far from it.

Right.

I do it for fun. Like, there's no business behind it. Like, whatever I think about, I'm like, I'll do it right.

You're helping out so many people in your passion. You're helping others discover their passion after they listen to you.

Sure. So I'm like, I started YouTubing, and turns out people like that format. And.

What was the most interesting thing that's happened to you since you started your series?

Sure.

Right? Not monetarily sure, but deep in your heart, what is the best thing that's happened to you and affected you personally after you're serious?

This dates before I started doing blockchain. For me, I'm a big proponent of education. I never went to high School, I got kicked out. I started doing business when I was 15 years old. I'm 32 right now. I've had many. For me is I love the fact that no matter where you are in the world, with Internet connection and handheld device, you can get education for free. So for me, my biggest love and what illuminates my heart is the fact that people out of their own volition, without any authority, without anybody telling them to learn, they willfully learn by themselves.

Have you and Vitalik thought about building out a school or an educational platform for cryptocurrency?

That's what the Block Geeks is about. We're the world's largest online community for training developers. We have 3.5 million visitors a month, 6,000 students right now on block geeks we have 3 full time blockchain engineers are creating curriculum and we're just moving forward.

And how do you plan on scaling that? Expanding, reaching out to more folks.

It's completely online, so it's agnostic, meaning we don't just focus on any technology. We'll do Ethereum, Bitcoin, Hyperledger, and no matter where you are in the world, as long as you have an Internet connection, you can take our online training.

What's the biggest challenge you've come across with the online?

I'll tell you exactly what that is. Number one, finding teachers that can teach and number two, finding teachers that actually know about this space. So that was mission impossible. We didn't find anybody. So what we found is very, very smart engineers that have the love of teaching. Then we train them blockchain because it's all video based, right? So we have videographers and they spend every single day. We make very high quality courses, study our own pace, right. Bit by bit. So that's the biggest challenge is finding people who have the capability of teaching.

So is there a future in a blockchain based teaching platform that really the end reward is how the student achieves their cryptocurrency education. Have you thought about incorporating a coin or a token of sorts into this educational platform?

Not in BlockX there's going to be for example we're launching Bounty soon where students with their knowledge, they learn from courses can earn bounties and block geeks will give thousands of dollars away in ether per month. So we're incentivizing students plus we're gonna have a reputation system, non tokenized, that'll be attached to your GitHub. And we've worked with ZipRecruiter and like big recruiting agencies that with your GitHub code demo that you. We guarantee you a job. Right. For me, I'm big on E commerce, I'm big on SaaS. And Blockeaks is a SaaS model. We're completely cash flow neutral within two months and complete profitable within three months. Right. So for us, yeah, thank you. Bootstrapped, no money raised. All individual. Me, Dimitri and Vlad, our business partner. So for me, I care about profits in a business, obviously business doing good before profits come people first and profit second. So for me, I see no need to tokenize block cakes. I see no need to blockchain it. It actually takes away from the benefit of my students. That's not to say other platforms can come around. I think we still have a very long way for something to work like that. The reality of blockchain, it's slow, it's clunky. For example, if you're an ERC20 token, you can do seven transactions per second. My business can't handle seven transactions per second. I need hundreds of transactions per second. So the reality is that the technology is not capable yet and we have a couple of years for this reality to actually catch up with us.

My next question is, who would you ideally like to work with on your platform to better serve your consumer?

On our platform, ideally, we're doing something right now like that we're actually doing big scholarships. So we're trying to work with the biggest companies in the blockchain space, whether that is L4V, our venture fund, which I'm advisor for, or whether that is like Cosmos, you know, the sidechain, whether that is blockable, the amazing recruitment agency or normative, a massive dev shop that we work in Toronto. But we're launching a huge scholarship for people that can't afford. Even though we try to make it as affordable as possible, it's only $50 a month for all access to our courses, full Q and A support from our teachers. Like, we try to make it as affordable, but once again, we're a business. Right. So we're launching this amazing scholarship where, like, you tell us why you can't afford it, tell us what you want to learn, and you're in.

That's. That is absolutely awesome. When is that launching?

Well, I haven't made a public announcement, but Q1, like January.

Yeah, you've heard it here first on Cointelegraph, but you won't hear it until Q1.

That's right. You guys got it first. Yeah.

Is there anything that you want the world to know right now about cryptocurrency Bitcoin at 10,000 in December, right? What do you want the world to know about how they should look at cryptocurrency and how they should look at blockchain?

I think a great example for this is if we look at history, right? If you look at, there's something called the Gall's law where it states that if we look at a complex ecosystem like an organism, it never evolved from a complicated organism, it evolved from a single organism. And over time, that single organism became a complex organism. And so when we're looking at society and we're looking at where do we want to go in the future, most people will be afraid of evolving into a multicellular organism, becoming much more variable and more advanced. So my advice for people is no matter who you are, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're working nine to five, whether your mother, whether you're a father, whether you're somebody in the bureaucratic government is take your time to just understand one aspect that you care about. Most people try to understand everything. They try to become an expert in this aspect. I tell people, understand one thing, understand that bitcoin. If you could just understand that bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a cryptocurrency has these features, that's a huge step forward, right? And with that knowledge you can go down the rabbit hole. But the bottom line is like anything in life, what is reality? Reality is perception of your thoughts, right? So the story is like for example, bitcoin, right now just I think it's like 2500 last time I checked in CoinMarketCap. That is the story that we told ourselves around the world. And that's the story that people are accepting as truth. That doesn't mean how good the technology is, that doesn't mean the use case of the technology. All that states is that people believe that story.

Perception is reality.

Perception is reality. That's right, absolutely.

How can we construct a way that the underserved, those who don't have Access not even 2G networks, how can we create a social cause pool almost off of your scholarship idea, how can we create that with all of these companies that are involved with blockchain technology?

Well, funny you say that. So something that I want to do and there's. I have to figure out the reputation system and we're working on this, we want to build it on LMS is at the end of the day, I'm a fintech company, right? And I know many companies. And regardless of the blockchain space is the biggest problem in the tech space is really good developers. And a certification doesn't mean you're a good dev. Means nothing. Like, congratulations, you have a fucking PDF, right? I want to see your GitHub portfolio. I want to see how many questions you answer on Stack Exchange. I actually want to see the work that you put in, right? Just show me. Show me your developer. Show me the code, dude.

Man, now you just made my motherfucking trip, dude.

My pleasure, man, my pleasure.