Luka Buzaladze: A Career Built Outside the Usual Path

Not everyone kicks off their career traditionally. Luka Buzaladze grew up in Georgia and started programming without a roadmap. He didn’t have formal training, just curiosity. At eighteen, he launched bidzer.ge, a site that took off fast. It became a popular website in Georgia, with over 500,000 users a year.

The project got him on national television and written about in Georgian news outlets. But for Luka, it wasn’t about fame; it was the fact that people used what he built, and they kept coming back. That feedback loop kept him motivated and focused. Seeing strangers rely on something he coded gave him proof he was on the right track, even without a classroom or degree.

That first project taught him lessons you don’t find in textbooks. Servers break. Users complain. Growth creates problems you didn’t expect. Luka learned to solve issues in the moment. Fix one thing, move to the next, repeat.

Luka never went back to college. Instead, he trusted what he was learning on his own. Building in real time turned into its own education. Every mistake made him sharper. Every update kept the platform alive. Ultimately, it was practical training, the kind you only get by shipping work and watching people use it.

Later, Luka moved to Canada and stepped into crypto. In 2020, he joined Bitbuy, which was growing quickly. Then, he became a part of the core engineering team. Of course, the job wasn’t easy. Crypto never slows down, and mistakes carry weight.

By the time he left in 2023, Bitbuy had become one of Canada’s largest exchanges and was later acquired. Luka had been there through the expansion, helping it hold together as the pace picked up. Working alongside that environment meant adapting daily. Market swings and sudden traffic spikes made every week unpredictable, but it sharpened his ability to handle pressure.

After Bitbuy, Luka joined Pocket Protector as the first engineering hire. The pressure was different: early-stage and no safety net. He ended up leading the technical side, building out the trading frontend.

That platform eventually reached over a billion dollars in annualized trading volume. Later, it was acquired by dYdX. Luka’s role was tied to the entire run, from the first steps through to the acquisition. Being there from day one meant every decision mattered, and he learned the weight of those choices firsthand.

One constant in his story is that Luka never earned a degree. For some, that created doubt. He’s met that by pointing to results. His projects work, they scale, and they get acquired. That’s the proof.

Luka talks about being honest about what he does well and where he needs others. He believes in surrounding himself with strong teammates. He also treats risk as something to study rather than avoid. This has shaped how he moves between startups and exchanges. For him, risk is less about gambling and more about calculation.

Right now, Luka is focused on building with early teams. He wants to keep working with startups and growing projects with people who push him.

The path he’s taken isn’t traditional, but the pattern is there. Build something, prove it works, and move to the next challenge. From Georgia to Canada, Luka Buzaladze has kept doing just that.