Ilias Anwar

0:00Welcome

ChristianneIlias Anwar, thank you so much for coming on.

IliasThank you so much for having me. For the people watching at home, this is going to be a very organic conversation, because I met you at one of our events last night, and now I'm here in this beautiful studio.

ChristianneTech Week was insane. You were everywhere.

IliasBy the time this is done, we'll have thrown 16 events. Over the eight or nine years I've been doing this, events have come naturally to me. But I'm not going to lie, I'm so thankful it's done after today. I'm absolutely exhausted.

ChristianneWhy do you feel called to events?

IliasA lot of the things I do, I say I hate, but my definition of hate is a little different. I actually hate throwing events. But I know I'm very good at it, and I like doing it for other people. Whether it's an investor party, an investor dinner, a creator mixer or a founder pitch competition, what I love is the energy people give me afterward, and how thankful they are for the opportunities and connections. Friday night we threw an investor party and had to turn away about 200 people. Someone even threatened our co-host, an investor, over Instagram DMs because they couldn't get in. That's the part I hate. But I love the aftermath: the relationships and connections that form. Even this podcast. We met at that event, and now we're here.

ChristianneDo you think you're an extrovert?

IliasThere's nothing I'd rather do than eat American Chinese food and watch Family Guy or The Simpsons alone in my apartment. But at an event, I feed off other people's energy. People who see me in my element are surprised to learn I'm actually a very private, introverted person. I can just turn it on.

2:30Immigrant parents: two jobs, a host who never ate

ChristianneWhat was it like for you growing up?

IliasI usually keep family life private, but since you asked. My parents come from a very traditional background. They're both immigrants. My dad worked so hard. He'd wake up at four in the morning and work until eight at night, two jobs, his whole life. So when I catch myself complaining, I know it doesn't come close to what my father went through to provide for us.

That's probably another reason I work so hard. I want to be there for my future family and never have that time taken away. So I want to work hard and smart now, so that from 35 on I don't have to work, or the work is passive. I want to travel the world with my family, and hopefully, God willing, my parents are still around for it. I'm obsessed with the idea of full freedom: whatever I want to do in a moment, I can do it.

And my mom always went above and beyond whenever we had guests. I think that's how I learned to be a good host. Being a good host means being terrible to yourself. Forgetting everything about yourself. My mom would never even eat. She'd be in the kitchen cooking until the very last minute while everybody else ate, running around with plates, making sure everybody was taken care of. I learned how to be a hard worker from my father and how to be a great host from my mother. Those are skills I'll have for the rest of my life.

ChristianneYou said you want to build so you can take care of the people around you. Where does that come from?

IliasI actually thought about this. Why can't I just have the white picket fence and the dog? And I still will. Building your own family is the most important thing. But when I was younger, the safest and happiest I felt was at big weddings, with all my relatives under one roof. My mom and dad each have eight or nine siblings, so I have hundreds of cousins, and it felt like every year there was a different wedding. Those were my favorite nights, running around with my cousins. I never wanted them to end.

I think that's why I love building community and throwing so many events. It's a little glimpse of those moments: everyone you love in one room, your closest friends and your most creative friends, all working on the coolest things, connecting, celebrating. I'm addicted to that feeling and I never want it to end.

ChristianneThat's not what I thought you were going to say. I thought it would be something more general, about uplifting other people.

IliasSomebody helped me realize this. I had a life coach, Vivek Pandit, who works with entrepreneurs and creatives on their why. He came to my events, which is the great thing about throwing them. I gave him that answer, about wanting to uplift others, and he said, that's not why you're doing it at all. I love how selfless it sounds, but you want to uplift others because it makes you feel good. When the people around you are chasing big dreams, it makes you comfortable dreaming bigger yourself. If someone around me wants to be the biggest creator in the world, and someone wants to be a DJ, then I feel comfortable saying, I want to make that film. I have a dream.

Am I making you cry? The guest is supposed to cry.

ChristianneIt's okay. Isn't it kind of beautiful?

IliasI come from a culture, Central Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, really Asian culture in general, where you're not told to chase your dreams. It's taboo, and people look at you differently. I always hoped to break that barrier and be an example for other people. So it was interesting to learn that my passion for helping people comes partly from an insecurity, from not feeling fully comfortable pursuing my own dream. I work 24/7, but maybe I'm not as vocal about it.

ChristianneSomething about people giving up on their own dreams breaks my heart. People in my life say, I want so much more, but I don't have the bandwidth or the resources. If they saw themselves the way I see them, they'd know they're invincible.

IliasThere's a saying along the lines of: you're not frustrated with the action people take, you're frustrated with the potential they don't see in themselves. But maybe they don't have those goals. Maybe you're projecting what you'd do in their shoes. I struggle with that too. Shout out to my therapist, who told me, your job is not to fix their life. Just today I met a guy in our community who's a bit all over the place, and I couldn't help myself. Do this, this and this. I said, forgive me, this comes from my respect and love for you. But at the end of the day, it's up to him.

5:40The $28M April Fool's prank that actually worked

ChristianneLet's talk about the 28-million-dollar April Fool's prank.

IliasWhen I first got into the business world, I realized a lot of people wouldn't invest in anything I was building unless I already had investors, an investor network or an exited company. I came from the entertainment industry, working with musicians, celebrities and creators. Now, in 2026, that's the craze. Everyone can build a product, so the skills in demand are distribution, community, marketing, events. But at the time, not a lot of people wanted to meet with us.

So I said, April Fool's is coming up, and there's a unique opportunity for me to do what I do best. I'm not a software engineer, but I can get people talking. I called our publicist and said, the only way investors will take us seriously is if we sell our company. So in the article, say it's an April Fool's prank, but in the headline, say we sold for 28 million, and we'll see what happens. The day before, I was so scared to launch it. I thought we'd get so much flak.

Within 24 hours, about 300 people reached out. Investors were calling us. VC funds and accelerators emailed us. Some had done their due diligence and found out it was a prank, and said, we sent this around the whole office, we thought it was great. Others hadn't read past the headline and were congratulating us. That's headline culture. A couple of sentences in, the article literally says it's an April Fool's prank.

A couple of forums hated it and called it astroturfing. But I'm not an industry baby. I had to get into these rooms somehow, and I'll get in the way I know I do best. If you have an issue with that, maybe you're blessed enough to already have that network. I wasn't. Two or three years later, I'm throwing parties and dinners for VCs and family offices, on a first-name basis with investors, when before I didn't know a single one. So I guess it worked. And this last April Fool's, a lot of people in our community did the same thing.

I got the idea from the fashion world. A clothing brand I followed used to announce every April Fool's that it was shutting down. Their community knew it was a joke and played along, and more people discovered them every year.

ChristianneI don't think it's wrong. You said it in the article.

IliasEverything is media, buzz and distribution. If you're doing something every single person agrees with, no one is going to tune in. Funnily enough, the original article got taken down because people complained. I can't even find it anymore.

9:10Borrowing from his little sister

ChristianneDo you have siblings?

IliasI have a sister, a couple of years younger. We're super close. She's my best friend. And I've never told this publicly, but she helped me out when I was going through it. As I was building, there were moments I was very low, and I couldn't ask my parents for money. So I'd call my sister and say, I need you to front me. Do you know how embarrassing that is for an older brother? I used to be the one sending her money.

I'd say, this is never again, it's just a transition in my business, I really believe in it, I need you to look out, no questions asked. She'd send it. I'd say, I'm never going to ask again. Two weeks later: I'm so sorry, can I? She'd send it. Three weeks later, the same. I paid her back every time, and then I'd ask again. It destroyed me. At one point she probably thought I was selling drugs. I swear I wasn't. I was building a business and losing money left and right. She's a hustler. She bought her car fully in cash.

I remember watching a podcast with Adam W, the comedian, and he said he couldn't ask his parents for money either, so he'd call his sister, and she fronted him money over and over. A couple of months later, I was in the same position. So I'm very thankful for my sister. I'll work smart enough that she never has to worry about money, and her kids won't either. I paid her back for everything, but I still feel like I owe her that.

ChristianneI have an older brother.

IliasWould you do that for him?

ChristianneYes. But I'd have a lot of questions. And I'd probably put something in writing.

IliasSee, my sister didn't even do that. If I were in her shoes, I wouldn't have done it, because of the pattern. What's going on every two weeks? The fact that she didn't ask means a lot to me. And growing up, we hated each other. She stole my Game Boy in elementary school and ruined my Pokémon progress, and I had to start from scratch. But now we're closer than ever.

12:40400K followers, gone in one night

ChristianneA lot of founders feel like their struggles are unique. Like they're the only ones who feel lost, staring out the window chewing glass. Take me through the ups and downs.

IliasWe had a media company with 400,000 followers across all socials, and in one night we lost everything.

We were getting hundreds of millions of views a month and had built out concerts and digital marketing. But it was basically a faceless media company. The people who knew, knew. I didn't leverage my own personal brand, which is why what you're doing with your face on this podcast is so smart. When we supported certain humanitarian movements and beliefs, our account got taken down. I won't get into it here, because it would suppress your video. I felt it was important to speak up with the platform we had. But because I had nothing as a personal brand, when that account was gone, I lost our biggest marketing vehicle.

From that day forward I said, I'm going to build a community, put my face forward, and help a lot of people. I didn't know where it would take me. A lot of people won't start without an end goal. I didn't have one. Now I know exactly what I want. I'm building Anwar Events, a community of entrepreneurs, investors and influencers, with events in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The end goal is a venture fund. We have distribution through the influencers, capital through the investors, and founders to invest in.

And I want to invest in underrepresented founders across the Asian diaspora. East Asian culture is beautiful, but Asia isn't just China, Taiwan and Korea. Asia is India, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and West Asia, the Middle East. Anyone can attend our events, but the companies we invest in will be led by founders from the Asian diaspora.

So for people at home who are afraid to start because they don't have a strategy: you don't always need one. So many people over-optimize strategy and have nothing to show for it. Do the action, and the strategy can come later. I'm not against systems. Bring in people who can build them. That's why my team is here. I'm here to spark something, and it's up to the people around me to throw gasoline on that spark and turn it into a fire.

16:0016 events in 5 days: Tech Week

ChristianneTech Week is technically five days, seven if you count the weekend. How on earth did you manage 16 events?

IliasBy collaborating with a lot of people. I'm getting credit for it, but there are so many people behind it, from community leaders like Venus Rose to my team on the back end. A lot of people prioritize money. But I gave the people I collaborate with so much value and showed up for them, so in a moment like this, they show up for me. You can't pay for that. You weren't there when I was in the hospital with a community member who got hit by a car. When I hear about something like that, I show up, and people are surprised, because no one else does.

To be treated like a king, you have to treat others like a king. A lot of people ask, why am I lonely? Why don't I have friends? Gen Z, this is for you. If you're sitting in bed all day being jealous of everyone, how are you treating people? I'm not saying empty your bank account for your best friend. Call your friend and ask if they want ice cream or want to go for a run. Buy them something that reminded you of them. Then watch them do the same for you two weeks later.

ChristianneWhich event are you most proud of?

IliasThe investor event. Remember, the reason I throw events is that the safest and happiest I felt as a kid was at those weddings, when for one night the world stopped and everyone I loved was under one roof. In our culture, we don't really party, so weddings are where it all comes out. At the investor event, all my clients were there, my whole team, my closest friends. People were making money, having a great time, celebrating. That's the kind of event we throw: creative people, people who can build, and people who can put money behind things. Put those three together and it makes magic.

We had a violinist and a saxophone player, and one of my best friends, Charles, DJ'd. Two years ago you'd have looked at him as a professional events guy, but what he loved more than anything was DJing. That night we brought him back to DJ, and that meant a lot to me.

ChristianneWhen you bring someone onto a project, you're bringing the whole person, not just one skill.

IliasI agree entirely. And maybe I want him to pursue DJing because it makes me more comfortable pursuing my own thing. It's more fun when you do it together. In college we walked around with twenty people: creatives, engineers, producers, musicians. This week reminded me of that.

21:00Bringing a $32B company to the US

ChristianneWhat's the 32-billion-dollar company you brought to the US?

IliasRedNote. They're based in China. When TikTok got banned, you saw the influx of Americans downloading RedNote. It was the number one downloaded app. A few months ago we helped them go to market in the US, and it happened because of my community. Someone who'd been to our events got hired as a growth marketer at RedNote. A month in, she didn't know who to bring on for marketing and events, and she reached out to us. We came up with a creator tour, and in less than two weeks we organized a five-city tour, including LA, San Francisco and New York. There's nobody as chaotic as us who could throw a tour in two weeks. Were we losing our minds? Did we think we could sell out? No. But with help from our community, we sold out every stop. Now we're finalizing a long-term contract with them.

Since then, initiatives from Central Asia that want to go to market and invest in the US are reaching out, and we're working with family offices in Central Asia, the Middle East and East Asia. None of that happens without RedNote. And I learned that doing business with Chinese businesspeople is very different from doing business with Americans.

26:30Action over perfection

ChristianneA theme I keep hearing is that it's more important to start than for things to be perfect. Why?

IliasThere's a saying that most of the world doesn't have the knowledge or take the action. Having the knowledge and taking the action is about 1% of the world. Knowledge can be hard to get. But if you keep taking action, eventually the knowledge catches up. I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I will out-produce anybody. If an AI researcher and I competed to publish the most research papers in a year, he'd have better work for the first three months. By the end of the year, I'd beat him on output every time.

No idea is a polished idea, and unpolished ideas lead you to better ones. It's like the gym. To lift heavier, you do more reps. Making something public is a rep. A lot of people treat their first launch as their magnum opus. I hate to break it to you: you're getting ten downloads. Keep shipping until you get to your magnum opus.

ChristianneWhat would you say to someone stuck on perfection?

IliasAsk why you're a perfectionist. When we post content, we get thousands of people showing love, and then there's one hate comment. I don't even look at those. We had a clip go out of context once: a restaurant review where a clipper cut out the part where I said I was joking. It did really well, and people said ridiculous things about us. But I know who I am.

So what are you actually afraid of? Being judged? Being perceived a certain way? Then you don't need to fix your perfectionism. You need to get okay with being judged. Almost every perfectionist I meet is afraid of being judged. If they could do half the work and not be judged for it, they'd be fine.

And taking action isn't easy. There's a lot of shadow work in it. I'll speak at an event, scared as hell, with voices in my head saying this person is going to think I'm stupid. Afterward people say, I didn't even know you were nervous. You do it enough times and you learn to ignore those voices.

31:00Creator Week: an SXSW for New York

ChristianneI'm embarrassed to say I don't know what Creator Week is.

IliasIt's a week that brings together the creator economy and the brands around it, but I want it to be South by Southwest for New York City. Post Malone got discovered at South by Southwest. Tech companies get funded there, because it's a meeting of all these different industries. You can be a creator in music, art, tech, film, fashion. New York has Tech Week, Fashion Week, Tribeca, and nothing that brings it all together.

It's like losing your phone. You look everywhere in the house, and it's in your back pocket. Creator Week is so obvious for New York that nobody has done it. I started it two years ago with no structure. I got eight community builders and we had an art day, a film day, a fashion day, a tech day, a creator day and a comedy day. The next year, 4,500 people showed up.

We're planning it around Fashion Week in September, because people are already in town and brands are already spending. Fashion Week has hundreds of thousands of people, and we're getting a couple thousand. So, collaboration. We'll piggyback on Fashion Week, and in a couple of years Creator Week will stand on its own. I've been offered a crazy amount of money to do it in Dubai and in China. But it has to be New York. This is the cultural hub of the world. Every high-level investor and creative I meet tells me there's something here. This is my magnum opus. It might take five years. It might blow up in one. But it's what I'm dedicating the next few years of my life to.

ChristianneWhat's your venture community studio?

IliasTechnically it's an events marketing agency, but we take equity and cash for building communities and throwing events for companies. There's venture capital, where you put in money, and venture studios, where you help build the product. We're building a venture community: a holding company of the companies we help, which eventually funnels into the venture fund. I've been offered the chance to start SPVs, but I'm not an investor and I won't pretend to be. Let me experiment with my time and my go-to-market skills, not someone else's money.

38:00The year he lost his spark

ChristianneWhat do most people get wrong about building community?

IliasThey only think about their own community. How are you going to help me with my sponsors? How are you going to pack my room? But they don't attend your events or promote them. Community is you and I. How am I benefiting you? If you give enough people enough value, it swings back around. Help a hundred people, and maybe ten help you back, but those ten will go above and beyond. I've been done dirty a lot. I've been taken advantage of. But I won't let those people stop me from building genuine relationships. I'm going to keep giving. I have no other choice.

ChristianneWhy do people care so much about community in 2026?

IliasEverybody is making content, and AI is flooding social media. Whoever builds an AI blocker for social media, like an ad blocker, is going to be a billionaire. People can't trust anything online anymore, so community is the only way to authentically reach your customers. If you build a real relationship with someone in person, you can sell them anything, as long as they actually have the problem you're solving.

One thing I'm against is charging for events. Access and education should always be free. If you want quality, use an approval process, not money. Somebody who can't afford the ticket might be the perfect founder, and if they get into the room, they'll never forget that feeling. But I could be wrong, so next month I'm doing my first paid event in about two years. I'll come back and tell you how it goes.

ChristianneTell me about retiring your parents.

IliasThat's my biggest driver. My parents worked like dogs so we could afford to grow up where we did, in Virginia. My dad told me, I'm waiting for you to get everything squared away so we can retire. Social Security isn't what it's hyped up to be. Every time I go home, there's an extra wrinkle on his face, or he's walking a little slower. I see it every time. One day someone treated my mom badly at her job, and it made me furious that I wasn't in a position to have her quit. By the end of this year or next, she'll be retired for good.

My friend Devish Vaswani runs an agency that represents some of the biggest creators in the world, and he gave his mom a card. She just travels wherever she wants, and he posts pictures of her in random countries. I'm going to do exactly that. I want my mom to travel so much she's never home. That's why I'll never quit. I lost my spark for a year or two, and I thought, maybe I'm not meant for this, let me just go work a job. But I've seen success recently, and I feel like my old self again. When I was 18 or 19, I thought I was going to conquer the world. Then COVID hit, the event business was gone, we pivoted to an influencer marketing agency, and the big agencies moved in and cut us out. Now I have the right team, and the confidence I had a few years ago.

ChristianneIf someone listening has lost their spark, what would you say to them?

IliasGo back to what you really want. Even when I lost my spark, I knew I wanted to retire my parents. I don't want money to be a problem in my future relationships or my marriage, and I don't want money to stop me from creating. I have millions of ideas. If I had the money, I'd start 200 companies tomorrow. In a week or two I'm going into a studio, and I'm not even a musician. I just want to make music with my friends. If I want to be a filmmaker, I'll be a filmmaker tomorrow.

Your spark won't be there 24/7. It's like a merry-go-round. You'll come back around. A lot of people lose their spark and think, maybe this isn't for me. No. Figure out what you want, and when the momentum comes back, strike.

Think about the hierarchy of needs. Someone told me he wanted to be a community builder and write research papers, and I said, brother, you can't pay your rent. You can't be your most creative self when you're worried about the bare minimum. First you eat, you sleep, you know you're safe. Then you can be social. Then you can give back and create. You can't be the next MrBeast if you can't pay rent. So go do what makes you money first. A lot of people try to do it all tomorrow, last a month or two, see no results and quit.

It's like shooting a hundred baskets. If I rent a gym for an hour at a thousand dollars, I might rush. If you build your own court, you can shoot for six months. Even if it takes you longer, you're more likely to hit a hundred. You need to be a cockroach. Every New Yorker hates cockroaches, so it sticks. A cockroach can outlast a nuclear bomb. Your nuclear bomb might be a divorce, or your mom telling you not to be a content creator. Build the foundation so you can last. It might take me a year or ten years with content, but I'll make it, because I can outlast the person living paycheck to paycheck trying to be MrBeast tomorrow. There's nothing wrong with a nine-to-five. Everyone who's successful waited for their turn, and when the opportunity came, went all in.

ChristianneWhat did that year look like?

IliasI don't want to talk about all of it. Everything hit at once, in every part of my life: money, work, relationships. It made me question who I was. Having to ask my sister for money messed with my ego. Am I the right person for this? A couple of years ago I was killing it, and that person wouldn't be in this position.

I was ready to take a full-time corporate job. Some of my companies were still making money, but in New York I'd set myself up to need a lot each month, and even with money coming in, I was in the red. And when I moved here, I found out I was subleasing a room from someone who was about to be evicted. My company, friends, all of it at once.

Thankfully, I had people who believed in me. My friend Brandon never asked me for a single thing, but he always told me, I believe in you. That's worth more than anything. Now everyone sees 16 events at Tech Week and wants to be part of it. A year ago they weren't there, and you can't fault people for that. People want to be part of things that are exciting. In college, nobody could have taken my confidence away from me. A year ago, you could have. But he showed up, and it made me believe in myself again.

My mom honestly doesn't care about being retired. She wants me to get married and have kids. For her, a million dollars is me having four kids and a townhouse near her. And I'll do that. But give me two or three more years. Let me go all in now, and if it doesn't work out, I'll go be a VP or in the C-suite somewhere with the skills I've built. I'll have the wife and the big house and a golden doodle. But right now the momentum is here, and I want to take a stab at it, so I never live with regret.

ChristianneHave you always been a dreamer?

IliasMore creatively than in business. I've always been a world builder. In video games I'd start organizations and run around the server recruiting everyone into my guild on MapleStory. I was a huge gamer: RuneScape, Call of Duty zombies, Black Ops 2. And that's how I do business. I don't pitch like an entrepreneur, I pitch like a comedian. I don't build community like an entrepreneur, I build it like a guild organizer. I dress like a creative, from the fashion world. I shoot promos like short films. I didn't grow up in business. I just happen to be in business, and to be good at it.

ChristianneIs there anything else you want to say?

IliasI want to give value to the people at home. If you're a creative, a filmmaker, a fashion designer, or building a tech company, I want to give you access to our events, and if you're watching this, I'll give you the book I wrote on building your personal brand for free. My socials are in the description. If I can be a resource to you, I'd love to help.

ChristianneIlias, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure.

IliasThank you so much for having me.