Around this time last year, I figured out how to compete with Netflix. The problem with even trying to be a player in the streaming industry is that it’s still for the most part a money game — spending billions of dollars to license TV shows, movies and songs at scale.

I tried a VR headset with motion trackers for the first time. The moment I put it on, I knew it. People aren’t just going to watch movies on a screen anymore, they’re actually going to be a part of it, in the scene, with the characters. And the best part — Netflix and Amazon can’t just spend billions of dollars to license VR content, there isn’t any. And I had time, the market would probably take 10 years to reach critical mass.

So the plan was to dedicate the next decade of my life to being the best VR filmmaker in the world and refocus all of Schédio onto making VR content at scale — from news to movies.

We would build a streaming service that acts as a platform for companies to create VR channels and flood it with a wide range of VR content we produce under different brand names. And over time make way for other types of content and get the companies streaming their VR/AR content to stream their traditional content.

An early mockup of the app with a No Man’s Sky environment.

In the process of finding the resources to realise that idea, I came across the Blockchain. I heard about Bitcoin years ago like most people because of the Deep Web. Sometime in 2012, a friend came up to me with a proposition to invest in hardware to mine Bitcoin. I didn’t really need anything from Silk Road, so I passed. I heard about Bitcoin a lot more after that. It was fun watching the hysteria unfold. But I never really gave it much thought, I was busy building Schédio.

As I started reading about the Blockchain, I started feeling embarrassed about the fact that I knew what Bitcoin was all this time and never thought of looking into the technology behind it. There was a revolution happening in front of me and I was blind.