#chooseblocks

I met Alireza Tahmasebzadeh one year ago on a trip to Silicon Valley, and found him to be an extremely surprising character; he had already published books at the age of 19 (same age as me at the time!). The trip was organised through our university’s entrepreneur society, of which Serge Vasylechko was the 25 year old President for 3 years running, who turned out to be a very ambitious figure.

I was approached by these two in January of 2014, shortly after I had just published my digital portfolio. That’s when I heard about the smartwatch idea that would change my life.

THE IDEA

It turned out that a few months before, Alireza had wanted to build a gesture-control smartwatch; imagine increasing the volume of your TV by simply raising your hand, switching to the next song on your playlist by flicking your wrist, or even fast forwarding a movie by moving your hand in a clockwise circle.

However, having approached Serge for advice, Alireza was forced to consider other sensors. Serge, the bio-engineer, has a huge passion for using technology in the world of health. He wanted to bring life-changing instruments to your wrist; heart rate monitors, blood oxygen meters, activity trackers.

They couldn’t decide on what to put in the smartwatch. That problem was key.

I won’t forget how Serge described Alireza’s epiphany: “I was spammed with texts from Ali, it was ridiculous! I received hundreds, one after another, texts about some sort of customizable smartwatch.”

Why not build a smartwatch that let’s the user decide what hardware they want? BOOM! Problem = Solved.

They went straight into it. One of Serge’s friends, Omer El Fakir, a 25 year old in the last year of his Mechanical Engineering PhD, had awesome skills with 3D modelling. He was naturally their first point of contact to help visualize the idea.

It was Omer’s 3D concept images that Serge and Alireza presented to me in January. As soon as I saw them, oh my. The idea. Blew. My. Mind.

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

I wanted in. I didn’t say it at the time (trying to keep my cool!), I just waited for them to ask me to work with them while they continued describing the idea. I must say, as they went on, I got hooked even more. What really caught me was the idea of open development, how anyone could create their own BLOCKS, like an appstore, but for hardware!

It wasn’t long before they asked if I could help them bring this to life. I kept my cool…”ye sure, would be pretty fun…”. It was then that we had planned on me bringing the idea out to the masses, to see how the world would react.

February 7th, I published a simple website explaining the concept. The following week, I spent a whole 12 hours straight putting together a video they had scripted. I uploaded it a few hours past midnight, exhausted, satisfied, waiting.

That morning, the first out of many to come, I awoke to an unbelievable number of messages from Alireza, Serge & Omer…

THE BIG BANG

We had surpassed 1000 views overnight, and it kept on climbing. We were hitting refresh in our browsers, again and again, watching the count go up and up! Before we knew it, tech magazines were writing about us worldwide!

Like with any business idea, one needs to first validate that there’s actually a demand for it. And we did.

Since then, we’ve been working non-stop on BLOCKS. There have even been times where we’ve worked all night, in pure excitement of seeing BLOCKS become a reality! We’re getting closer everyday, and you can follow our journey right here…

Yours truly,
Hakeem Javaid