When Ilias Anwar first arrived in New York City, he did not arrive with a network waiting for him. There were no weekly investor dinners with his name attached, no famous creators expecting him, no built-in founder ecosystem to plug into. His community in the city was effectively zero, especially right after he lost his media company, TCC Entertainment with 500k+ followers. Flash forward to a year later and he is closing on 40,000 members on his events newsletter.
The difference is this time he completely owned his audience.
He came to New York to build, and the second he landed here, he was on a mission.
At the time, his focus was Tapped AI, a live music data platform he co-founded to bring structure and analytics into an industry that historically ran on instinct and relationships. After producing more than 500 events in previous years, Anwar had no intention of becoming “the event guy” again. He wanted to transition fully into technology and infrastructure.
The transition did not start smoothly.
Before New York, Anwar had spent seven years building his media company, scaling it to more than one billion views across platforms. It was not a short experiment; it was a multi-year investment of energy, credibility, and distribution. Then, almost overnight, it disappeared. Years of digital leverage built on rented platforms vanished after multiple copyright strikes and his support for AMP (American Muslims for Palestine).
The loss forced a reset.
Rather than rebuilding a traditional media operation, Anwar made a different decision. He doubled down on something algorithms could not erase: real-world community.
Early in his New York chapter, he organized small Tapped gatherings to bring founders, creatives, and operators into the same rooms. These were not flashy events designed for optics. They were curated environments designed for alignment. It was inside one of these early gatherings that he met Rohan, who would later become one of his closest collaborators and co-founders. The partnership did not emerge from a formal accelerator or cold investor outreach. It emerged from conversation, shared belief, and proximity inside a room Anwar had intentionally designed.
Around the same time, he grew his events community and became a co founder of Cliqk alongside Gary Sargeant and Alvin Pan. Each brought a different strength to the table: operational clarity, strategic perspective, technical execution, and complementary networks.
Gary “Bolo” Sargeant is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Cliqk. He brings more than 25 years of experience in music and culture marketing, having worked in radio promotions, lifestyle marketing, and major campaigns for artists like Beyoncé, Usher, Young Thug, Gunna, and Megan Thee Stallion, and now applies that cultural expertise to scaling creator + brand distribution systems.
Alvin Pan is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Cliqk. He transitioned from developing autonomous systems, reinforcement learning, and large-scale video learning in medical robotics research to building the technical foundation behind Cliqk’s AI-powered content distribution infrastructure, applying systems thinking to how ideas spread across platforms at scale.
Alongside, Rohan Gurram who was the CEO of Cliqk (2x Yale Grad) and had brought together these four juggernauts.
The true inflection point, however, came through an unconventional marketing move.
On April Fools’ Day two years ago, Anwar executed a bold narrative play around a supposed $28 million fundraising announcement tied to Tapped. Before publishing it, he called his publicist. The move was intentional. If the story was going to spread, it needed velocity.
The announcement blurred the line between satire and ambition. It spread rapidly across social platforms, generating curiosity, inbound investor conversations, and a surge of attention. What began as a prank quickly turned into traction.
For someone who had entered New York with zero community, he instantly built hype around himself.
The prank did not magically build trust, but it opened doors. More importantly, it validated Anwar’s long-standing belief that narrative, when timed correctly, can accelerate distribution.
With attention building, the demand for in-person connection followed. Although he had promised himself he would not return to large-scale event production, the rooms filled quickly.
The difference this time was structure.
These were not random mixers. Each event fed a broader flywheel. Founders met creators. Creators met operators. Operators met investors. Conversations led to partnerships. Partnerships fed platforms. Platforms fed future gatherings.
Tapped AI benefited from this momentum, but so did Anwar’s broader ecosystem. The events were no longer distractions from the product; they were distribution nodes that strengthened it.
What emerged in New York was not simply a series of successful gatherings. It was a coordinated marketing and events infrastructure spanning founders, creators, and cultural operators. The empire was not defined by spectacle alone, but by interconnected leverage.
From losing a billion-view media company to rebuilding from zero community in a new city, Anwar’s strategy evolved from chasing exposure to engineering ecosystems. Alongside co-founders like Rohan, Gary Sargeant, and Alvin Pan, he began constructing something more durable than a viral spike.
In a city where momentum determines relevance, Anwar did not inherit influence. He manufactured it.
The dorm-room beginnings taught him how to gather attention. The billion-view media run taught him scale. The collapse taught him ownership. New York became the laboratory where all three lessons converged.
Today, the marketing and events empire he built in NYC operates less like a collection of projects and more like a distribution machine.
For Ilias Anwar and his co-founders, the rooms were never the end goal.
They were the beginning of something larger, and in less than a year, he had explosive growth, hitting 40k members and now launching his company, mycliqk.com.
