Creativity and Community

For Christopher Josephs ’17 VSB and Ryan Mazzie ’18 VSB, VSB courses went beyond simple instruction, inspiring creativity and community thinking. Each offers their perspective on how their classes sparked thinking that remains at the core of their careers and their new social investing app: IRIS.

IRIS is a social investing app where users connect their third-party brokerage accounts, such as Robinhood; follow their friends, family, or influencers' actual trades/portfolios; and collaborate on stock ideas–all in real time. As a user, you have complete control choosing which portfolios to watch, simply by adding them to your watch list. You can instantly see other portfolio compositions in detail, as well as their growth results over time. Users can also share trends and tactics. This social collaboration is coupled with an emphasis on transparency, whereby each member offers a view of their portfolios and trading for the same in return. 

Josephs ’17 VSB recalls his VSB Equity Markets and Valuation course as having sparked his creative juices, unknowingly hinting toward what he has created at present in IRIS. At the start of every class, an article would be presented that informed the class of new events, inventions, and occurrences around the world that could affect the nature of the stock market and have immeasurable impact. Recognizing his own lack of knowledge surrounding these ideas and the vastness of information available, Josephs concluded that most people don’t know what is going on and have no way of keeping up. This idea would evolve to Josephs’ working thought as he laid the stones to develop IRIS: There is a gap between the retail person to keep up with the pace and nature of Wall Street. I want IRIS to be the Main Street of Wall Street.”

For Mazzie ’18 VSB, his course with Professor Keith Wright, Assistant Professor of the Practice, Accounting & Information Systems, offered him an emphasis on community thinking. He recalls how Wright would always present the class with the latest technology or development in the world, probing for their insights and opinions on the topics. He would use his class as a test group of sorts, encouraging collaborative thinking and the sharing of ideas among students. Mazzie invests his collaborative mindset from his VSB experience into the social investing environment and growth of IRIS.

Both alumni took to bridging the gap between Wall Street and the retail person by recognizing that the social sharing and collaboration of today has given retail investors the power to move markets. As digital natives, several Villanova students including IRIS co-founder Josephs and partner Mazzie, have grown up engulfed in social media, and the first thing this new generation wants to see is what others are investing in, right now! Real time collaboration provides the social foundation to trade together and triumph together. They are able to now offer this in IRIS, having greatly expanded on what they took away from their courses.