When Ilias Anwar arrived in New York City, he was fresh off a $28 million April Fool’s prank that had unexpectedly placed his name inside corporate tech conversations. The stunt, executed through his startup Tapped AI, generated widespread attention and opened doors to previously inaccessible rooms. While the acquisition claim was fictional, the visibility was very real, and it accelerated his entry into serious conversations across media, music, and technology.
Eighteen months later, he was hosting an event featuring Tom Brady’s private chef.
The evening began as a private, carefully curated gathering in Lower Manhattan, bringing together founders, celebrities, influencers, investors, and operators building at the intersection of technology, culture, and capital. By this stage in his career, Anwar had come to understand something that many marketers overlook: leverage is not created by volume, but by alignment. Fifty well-positioned people in a room can create more long-term momentum than five million passive impressions online.
That night, he met Rob Fajardo, the CEO of Leave Normal Behind.
The introduction was not the result of months of strategic planning or brokered negotiations. It was a conversation that unfolded organically, rooted in a shared belief that physical rooms still matter in an increasingly digital-first world. Both men understood that while algorithms can distribute content, they cannot replicate the trust built face-to-face.
Fajardo introduced an unexpected element to the evening: Chef Will Lawrence, known for his work as a private chef to Tom Brady and Kevin Durant, among other elite figures in sports and business. The original concept for the event was straightforward — serve steak, maintain a high standard of luxury, and keep the atmosphere intimate without veering into spectacle.
However, when Chef Lawrence entered the space and observed the room’s composition, he recalibrated.
He saw more than attendees. He saw convergence. Celebrities were seated next to venture-backed founders. Influencers were exchanging ideas with infrastructure-focused operators. Investors were engaged in serious discussions with creators who were not chasing trends but shaping them. The density of talent and influence present demanded more than a conventional dinner service.
As a result, the culinary experience evolved in real time. The plating became more deliberate, the pacing more intentional, and the hospitality more immersive. The meal shifted from being a component of the evening to becoming an amplifier of the environment. It was no longer simply about serving steak; it was about elevating the room to match its potential.
For Anwar, the moment was not about celebrity adjacency or prestige signaling. It functioned as a validation of a broader thesis he had been developing for years. He had taken a chance on a spontaneous introduction to Fajardo, and once again, a curated room had generated outcomes that scale alone could not.
That dinner marked a turning point because it illustrated a deeper aspect of Anwar’s strategy. What he has built over the years is not merely a series of events; it is infrastructure disguised as events.
Through Ilias Events, he has hosted hundreds of curated gatherings across New York City and, more recently, San Francisco, including founder dinners, Tech Week activations, Fashion Week after-parties, and AI-focused salons. Each experience is designed not only for atmosphere but for network velocity, ensuring that capital, influence, and capability intersect with intention rather than by accident.
At the same time, through Cliqk, where he serves as Chief Marketing Officer, Anwar has been constructing the digital counterpart to those physical rooms. Cliqk operates not as a traditional creator marketplace but as a marketing infrastructure platform that enables brands to deploy creators systematically across multiple channels. On the business-to-consumer side, the platform is focused on helping founders, investors, and creators build their personal brands by automating and scheduling content distribution across social platforms, effectively turning individuals into structured media engines.
The connective logic is consistent. Offline rooms build trust, and online infrastructure scales that trust.
The private dinner with Rob Fajardo became a bridge between those two worlds. What began as a handshake evolved into collaboration, which in turn expanded into a shared vision. Alongside AI Collective, Founder Social Club, and Colton Kaplan, the blueprint for Ctrl Room began to take shape.
Ctrl Room is positioned not as another networking event but as a high-trust, invite-only convergence point for founders, creators, investors, and operators working at the frontier of artificial intelligence, media, and cultural influence. It is designed as a space where capital meets distribution, where influence meets infrastructure, and where relationships are built intentionally rather than opportunistically.
The philosophy traces back to a principle Anwar has followed since launching a blog from his dorm room in 2017: build the room.
From TCC Entertainment to Tapped AI to Ilias Events, and now Cliqk, his career has revolved around a consistent thesis: attention can be engineered, but trust must be curated. He has experienced the loss of platforms and rebuilt through people. He has built audiences and converted them into ecosystems.
Now, with access to tens of thousands of founders, creators, and investors through his newsletter and event network, and with Cliqk integrating media production, creator deployment, and structured distribution systems under one umbrella, the strategy appears increasingly vertical and cohesive.
Ctrl Room represents the next logical layer in that architecture.
What began as a private steak dinner ultimately functioned as a signal: when the right people are placed in the right environment, opportunity compounds.
For Anwar, the true product has never been the steak, the celebrity proximity, or even the headlines. It has always been the room itself.
