TEDxRutgers Potential Speaker with Entrepreneurial background

[Sohaib Iqbal]

Please see below!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Basil Alomary <basila...@outlook.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:29 PM
Subject: TEDx Rutgers
To: "sohay...@gmail.com" <sohay...@gmail.com>

Hey Sohay,

I was born in Yemen, the poorest Arab country and the only country in the world to have a capital city at risk for completely running out of water. Nevertheless, my parents brought me to the United States when I was almost five to do their master's degrees at Carnegie Mellon. Seeing how powerful education and aspiration are in creating better lives has always instilled an entrepreneurial spirit in me. I've carried this mindset and spirit into my personal and professional goals and it has been the single most rewarding asset in my life thus far. 

On a personal level it's helped me define and achieve both short and long term goals. It's helped me embrace failure as a learning tool and pushed me to do things I never thought possible. Just last year around the same time as TEDx, my business partner and I launched our first startup. A digital consulting and marketing firm dedicated to helping out startups in exchange for equity. It was successful, but we were unable to scale because we simply didn't have the experience to convince bigger startups that we knew what we were doing. So we set out on creating Cream + Sugar, our newest startup. From idea to launch, only 4 weeks, something completely unheard of for a ecommerce platform that required a multitude of legal negotiation and a whole lot of coding.  

My business partner, Maanek Kumar, and I created Cream + Sugar (www.crmsgr.com, https://angel.co/cream-sugar-1) with an 18 year old phenom programmer, Nick Sahler, who works with Jeff Atwood (founder of Stack Overflow) and many other major players in the tech field. In just a month we were able to secure a dozen contracts, sell a whole lot of coffee, and most importantly - prove to ourselves that it was possible. 

We closed the site down roughly a month ago to begin working on an incredible platform that will hopefully make a dent in the specialty coffee market. We plan on launching fully within the next month or two and have already made a lot of headway in building our own custom ecommerce platform. 

I've taken the skills learned in building Cream + Sugar to get myself a full time job as Head of Sales for LiveShop (www.liveshop.se) a product created by the number one ranked production agency in the world, all while still a full time student taking an 18 credit course load. And at the end of the day, I credit my entrepreneurial mindset for my successes. 

This entire process and my passion for building great things and launching great ideas has pushed me to start programming myself. In the last year I've gone from knowing nothing to being able to code in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and have just started learning Ruby on Rails. The mindset of an entrepreneur doesn't rely on monetary success, it relies on progress. This mindset pushes you to always want to be better than you are. It makes you want to have better relationships, better skills, and better dreams. 

I would love to be able to talk about my experiences and share why I think this mindset is integral in our increasingly global economy. Entrepreneurship has the potential to pull countries out of poverty, to help aid many of society's ills, and create better lives for people worldwide. 

I know this is an incredibly long-winded email, but it only demonstrates a fraction of my passion on the topic and my desire to share it at TEDx Rutgers.

If you want to know any more, feel free to ask anything or you can get some info at:

www.basilalomary.com

www.linkedin.com/in/basilalomary

I look forward to hearing back from you,

Basil 

--
Sohaib Iqbal

(732) 666-7855

Rutgers Business School 2013

President - Rutgers International Student Association

Organizer - TEDxRutgers