It’s easy to be proud of your kids. We celebrate their victories, revel in their achievements, and trust that we’ve done a good enough job that they’re going to be successful adults.
We cheer when they hit a personal best for their swim team despite finishing third. We post Instagram pictures of their work when they win the “Best Artist Award” of their class. We take them for ice cream for their “A” in History.
And then there are parents whose kid patents an idea before they’re done with school.
Shahnt Madalian is a driven young man (he made Eagle Scout from Troop 108 of OLV in Wayne). He and his Quantify team have developed a fin-tech software system that “connects traditional financial advising tools to the crypto market.”
Before you start asking questions of this entrepreneur about whether or not they’re going to take their business into an IPO, you might want to ask him first about finals.
Shahnt is a senior at Fairfield University. He has a double major in physics and economics. The software they developed recently won the school’s Startup Showcase, an annual competition where five teams pitch their ideas to investors. The money they won will be used to further improve their system.
This project wasn’t just developed to win a contest. It has real-world applications, and the contest will help give Quantify a leg up to help smaller investors join the world of cryptocurrency. “For us, this wasn’t just a class project or competition. For us, this was always real.” But the mentoring, particularly of Dr. Huntley, who runs the program was “integral to the process.”
“Originally it was going to be an app to help consumers invest in crypto more effectively,” Shahnt explains. “But after doing our market research, the team decided to pivot to financial advisors rather than the mass market. We saw a really distinct gap in this niche of smaller groups that really had no way of providing crypto to their clients.”
It was a grueling process. “Hundreds and hundreds of hours, every day, weekends, from September to April went into this. It was a very long process. A couple of us are double majors. All of us are overcommitted and overextended.”
Spoken like typical students who drop “fin-tech” and “compliance issues” into casual conversation, and who might just realistically change the world of finance.
Right now, Shahnt is working on another project in his other love, XR. He’s looking for versatile, adventurous programmers to join his group to work on another new groundbreaking venture.
It’s said that every astronaut who’s walked on the moon has been an Eagle Scout. Shahnt Madalian might be aiming higher than that. Don’t bet against him.