Iris was my second attempt at starting a "company," but it's still to date one of my favorite projects ever. I had the idea my junior year of college where I thought if we could take into account people's personal preferences, things like their diet, common study spots, etc. we could design a campus assistant that would make it vastly easier to navigate campus.
I asked the two smartest people I knew, Sam Gorman and Kanyes Thaker to work with me on this, and we've since worked on countless projects together.
Iris solved real problems at Berkeley, each "tool" was called a card. We launched with 6 cards, each one was meant to personalized to how exactly you navigated campus.
- Our study card would tell you live capacity of all your common study spots (cafes / libraries) along with a count of how many outlets were remaining. To build this, we manually counted the # of outlets at every single cafe across the city.
- Our deals card would get you discounts at your favorite food spots. We had an initial listing, and were in talks to partner with Snackpass to expand our selection.
- Out bus card would turn the public transit into an black-car service to your classes. It tells you when to exactly leave so that you get there right as the bus shows up. It even reminds you when to pull the cord once you're near your stop.
- Our dining hall card would filter the menu based on your preferences, so you didn't need to waste time going there only to find there were no good vegetarian options that night.
These are only a few examples, but the idea was eventually we could crowdsource information and create an incredibly personalized experience at each college campus.
We launched Iris at Berkeley, and it got over a thousand downloads organically in less than a week. Just as we were gearing up for our second launch, I remember being at Copy Central on March 16th, 2020, printing nearly a thousand posters to put up all over campus, when we received the following email from Chancellor Carol Christ:
Effective immediately, all in-person instruction is cancelled for the remainder of the semester unless and until the campus announces that in-person instruction may resume.
Within a week, our entire market collapsed and college students across America went home, and the on-campus problems we were solving became entirely nonexistent.
We rebranded to Iris Labs and spent the next 8 months shipping over 12 production apps which gained various amounts of traction, but ultimately we never quite found our footing.
Iris failed, but the period after was probably one of the most transformative of my life. I reflected over my learnings throughout the projects I had worked on in college, and developed a set of convictions for myself and my career that even today (5+ years later) set the undertone for the kind of life I want to live.