Transforming Education and Empowering Tomorrow's Entrepreneurs Unlocking global opportunities and fast-tracking innovation for aspiring entrepreneurs

EasyA, a London-based education technology company, is revolutionising learning in the world's fastest-growing tech fields through an accessible education platform, global hackathons, and direct connections to top investors. By merging education with opportunity, co-founders Phil Kwok and his brother Dom are nurturing the next generation of blockchain innovators, empowering students to launch billion-dollar startups. Entrepreneur UK sits down with Phil to find out more.

How is EasyA revolutionising education and entrepreneurship?
We're democratising education and entrepreneurship. First, with the EasyA app, anyone can learn the world's fastest-growing technologies at the push of a few buttons. No need to have an expensive Macbook or college education. Then, we fly out the best of these students to our in-person hackathons across the world: from London to Boston, or even as far as San Francisco and Singapore. The winners get up to $100,000 in no-strings-attached prize money (to use for whatever they want, be it getting that new Macbook, starting their new business or hiring a team). Finally, we help them raise from the best venture capitalists (VCs), Y Combinator, a16z, Founders Fund, you name it. It's a radically different way to teach people, but one which has grown into a community of over 1 million people already.

How have partnerships with blockchain leaders fueled EasyA's growth?
Partnerships have been a big growth driver. We're very selective in which partners we work with. That's because we only work with the ones that have a long-term view of education and a long-term vision themselves. Blockchain is a transformative technology, and one which every major government, company, and bank is adopting. But there are also those who are just looking for a quick win. We work with leaders who are genuinely pushing the boundaries of this technology. For example, Gavin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum) via his new blockchain Polkadot. These leaders inspire developers to join EasyA and learn from the best. In addition, these blockchain leaders help to invest in our best students, giving them funding to reach new levels of success. These partnerships inspire people, and create huge opportunities for them.

What initiatives is EasyA implementing to drive innovation in the Web3 space?
We've driven innovation at every level in Web3. At the consumer/adoption level, we built the very first mobile app for learning about Web3. This has onboarded over a million people to Web3 at an unprecedented pace. On a deep tech level, our team built the first ever smart contract deployment on a mobile phone. Smart contracts are the building blocks of Web3 applications, and this breakthrough has lowered the barrier to entry for founders by 100x, reducing the time it previously took from hours, to just minutes.

At the awareness level, we've brought new social channels to Web3. Our TikTok, Instagram and YouTube channels are the biggest in Web3, with almost 1.5 million fans and billions of views. This is bridging the gap between Web2 and Web3 for people. Furthermore, we're marrying education with funding via the EasyA x Polkadot University and our huge student investment fund.

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Can you share your journey and what inspired you to establish EasyA?
Looking back, my journey and what inspired me to start EasyA began when I was 16. I was revising for my GCSEs and stumbled across something that would change my life forever: The Bitcoin Whitepaper, by Satoshi Nakamoto. I became an early Bitcoin miner, and got deep into blockchain, learning all about the underlying technology, and contributing to it.

Flash forward a few years, and I was a law scholar at Cambridge University, where I built and launched more tech projects than I can count. This taught me how to build, (as well as how not to build), apps and websites that people loved, and how to scale them across universities. However, it also showed me how hard it was for someone outside of Silicon Valley to launch and fund a startup. The annual startups prize at my college was just £2,000. Crazily, it's still the same today.

Graduating, I knew I wanted to finish becoming a lawyer. But I wanted to do it fast. So I bought a book on how to pass the New York Bar, read it, and 6 weeks later was in New York sitting the world's toughest law exams. I passed with one of the highest marks, and became one of the youngest attorneys in New York. However, being an attorney was never the end goal. My life goal is to maximise the impact I have on the most people possible.

And that's why I started EasyA with my brother Dom: to democratise education for everyone. We started off as a tutoring app helping students with their maths questions. To help even more people, during Covid-19 we then pivoted into peer-to-peer mentoring to support tens of thousands of students for free, and topped the App Store charts. This was the beginning of EasyA. Again, my life goal called to me: maximise the impact I have on the most people possible. Helping just school students with questions they were stuck on was great, but ballooning to tens of thousands of students, we were reaching the limits of how far this could be scaled. So how could we maximise our impact? The answer: empower these students themselves to build their own technologies, and their own solutions. Rather than us solving a problem for them, we'd empower them to solve problems for others.

That was the beginning of the EasyA you see today. I looked back at the technologies that had transformed my life, and one image came rushing back to me: 16-year-old me, sitting in my parents' basement, mining Bitcoin. Satoshi had inspired me. Now I would inspire others. By teaching people about blockchain and Web3, and how these technologies can completely change the world: from banking the unbanked, to giving us back control over our data and safeguarding our civil liberties, to making sending money as cheap and effortless as sending an email.

What impactful outcomes have emerged from your hackathons?
Bigger startups than we could ever have imagined. They're collectively now valued at over $2.5 billion. One of those startups - Cognition Labs - is valued at $2 billion. And it all started at an EasyA hackathon. Co-founded by a Harvard computer science undergrad who was too scared to tell his parents he'd dropped out of college. They've since had the talk!

It's not just about valuations, of course. People have been scouted by recruiters for top jobs, been inspired to become founders, and of course made lifelong friendships.

Your vision for EasyA goes beyond education; how do you plan to nurture the next generation of blockchain innovators?
Education is the start of everything, but it is just the start. To nurture the next generation of blockchain innovators, we need to think about what comes next after they're educated. That's where we're going to be investing in them directly. It comes back to my experience building a startup at Cambridge University, where the annual startups prize was just £2,000. Education isn't enough. The funding needs to be there too. We're changing that dramatically.

Next month, we're announcing our fund: we'll be giving $1 million to students to launch their own Web3 startups. This is going to be huge, and will have a far-flung impact on the next generation of blockchain innovators. It will give them the firepower they need to make a dent in the world.

Can you elaborate on the significance of EasyA's collaboration with Polkadot University?
We aren't just collaborating, we're actually building a university. The EasyA x Polkadot University. We've joined forces with Polkadot to create the world's first ever blockchain university. This is a big deal. Blockchain is eating the world, just like artificial intelligence (AI) is, and whilst we have AI courses at almost every university, there are almost none that teach blockchain. The EasyA x Polkadot University changes that. It will teach students at the ground level how blockchain works, and how they can leverage it to change the world. We'll start at our strongest student hubs in the US and UK: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cambridge, and Oxford. We'll then expand outwards from there.

For the first time in history, the world is being shaped by students. Technology makes this possible. Vitalik Buterin was just a student when he dropped out to co-found Ethereum. Mark Zuckerberg was just a student when he started Facebook. Our vision for the EasyA x Polkadot University is to give birth to these leaders on a bigger scale than ever before.

Looking ahead, what are your aspirations for yourself, the blockchain industry, and EasyA?
My life mission is to maximise the impact I have on the most people possible. Through building EasyA, I've found that the single most powerful way I can do that is by helping people build startups. This starts with inspiring them, which is what we do via the EasyA app and our in-person hackathons. The EasyA x Polkadot University is the next step in that journey, and giving $1 million to students to launch their startups is going to kickstart a new wave of entrepreneurs. This wave won't happen on its own. I want to make it happen now.

We're at an inflection point in the blockchain industry. The technology is better than it's ever been, and it's almost ready for mass adoption. In other words, blockchain's ChatGPT moment is right around the corner. When that time comes, EasyA will be leading the charge in the cambrian explosion of startups that leverage blockchain to radically improve every aspect of our lives.

How does intuition influence your decision-making, and can you share a time when it led to a significant outcome?
Intuition is something I need to rely on whenever there's no clear answer to a decision. As a founder innovating at the bleeding edge of technology and community, that means pretty much all the time. That's not a bad thing. Over the years I've developed an intuition for things and embraced it in decision-making. It's something we need when we don't have enough information to conduct a more scientific analysis.

This has led to many significant outcomes, but one of the most important was in pivoting EasyA into Web3/blockchain. I had this feeling that this technology, which I had first learnt about when I was 16, was undergoing a paradigm shift, and that soon everybody would be learning about it. Whereas when I first joined over 10 years ago it was a small group of people nerding out about it, I could sense that the energy was changing. People were really starting to pay attention, and would need a trusted hand to guide them into Web3. What outcome did this intuition have? It meant that we were right ahead of the curve when excitement about Web3 started to skyrocket, and propelled us to 1 million users. It's set us on this trajectory to reach a billion people by the end of the decade.

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