Smartz Team. Interview with CEO Smartz Yuriy Vasilchikov

Smartz is not only the platform. Smartz is the team. We invite you to learn a bit more about what we’re made of as humans. Our CEO, Yuriy Vasilchikov, is the one to get this party started.

— How did your team come up with idea to create Smartz platform?

— It’s hard to point to any particular moment when this idea occurred. We all thought about this project for quite a time, formalizing our thoughts in this and that way. Our CMO Vadim Buyanov and lead developer Vladimir Khramov were the key people to bring this concept to life. Vadim thought about creating a marketplace for smart contracts and Vladimir had the idea to create a smart contract-builder. After this, all together we came up with Smartz. The first prototype was created during the hackathon in December 2017.

— Which problems did you face during the creation of the platform?

— I can’t recall any technical difficulties during the creation of the platform, and now everything is going smoothly. The only problem is that our ambition is bigger than our resources, mostly human resources.

— What must be changed for the global acceptance of smart contracts, by both governments and people?

— This is actually is the biggest question and challenge for us. Connecting virtual and real worlds is the biggest challenge for all new tech. There is no problem to transfer tokens, but there is a problem to transfer an ownership, if we talk about selling an apartment, for example. It isn’t hard to create an oracle platform, the real problem is to find the source of information for this oracle. In this regard, governments need to take some steps. In the ideal world, we want processes to be connected to blockchain.

The most important piece of this puzzle is people, Blockchain is still a niche technology. People must understand what decentralisation is, that it is safe, that it saves time. We have to help people understand how to use new tech and why they will profit from decentralisation. I believe that governments have no interest in the broad acceptance of Blockchain right now. By their nature, they are conservative, and I think that it is normal. Of course, we hope that governments will create new laws to control smart contracts, but they must think about all pros and cons before reaching this decision.

— How do you make decisions about the development of Smartz platform?

— We have 6 people in our board of directors. We discuss all keypoints and vote, if needed. Actually, we are going to implement blockchain voting system in the near future. There is no such thing as one-man decision. When we think about new features, we think about people, and of the product they demand.

— Why do you want to create a community of developers around Smartz platform?

— They are our clients as well. Our platform provides the opportunity for developers to sell their smart contracts on Smartz. Smartz works as a marketplace in this case.

— Smartz is not the first project for you. How did you use your past experience when launching Smartz platform?

— Each of our team members is experienced, most of our founders worked on big projects at Mail.Ru Group, some of them worked at Kaspersky. So they know how to create a platform for millions users.

— What qualities must the CEO of a tech company possess?

— This is a funny question. I have no idea (laughing). Ok, I’ll try. I think all leaders are different, but for me, the most important important thing is to understand developers. My experience as software engineer helps me. I understand what they need and what they mean. If a CEO is all about business only, he will need some sort of interpreter to communicate with developers.

— The last question is personal. What are your interests despite work?

— It is hard to tell right now because I work really hard, so work became my hobby. I really enjoy coding. I have a family and they need me as well, so I have basically no time for hobbies right now. Maybe video games, if I have free time.