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[ Performance by Team iLuminate ]
[ Applause ]
>>Miral Kotb: Thank you, thank you guys. Thank you so much. Hi. So that was iLuminate, a
company I started about two and a half years ago. And it's such an honor to be asked to
speak here and for my dancers and my team to get to perform here.
And I guess what they wanted me to talk about was how this idea came about and how a dancer,
slash, software engineer can actually also be a entrepreneur, which the people I'm speaking
after, it's just such an honor. Basically, since I was a kid, I calls danced, no matter
where we went, restaurants, wherever we went, I would run up to people and ask if they wanted
to dance. And sometimes I didn't even care what they said and I'd dance. But I also had
a different side of me that loved just thinking about math problems or just trying to figure
things out. So when I was nine, I started writing software back in the day, it was,
like, BASIC programming, I wrote, like, games. I just always had -- dance was more for my
heart and emotion, and computers was more for my brain. And then one of my friends challenged
me and said, have you ever thought to put them together? And I never did, I always separated
those two parts of my life, and I said no. And I started thinking about what I would
do if I put them together. And then I got this idea as an artist, as I was choreographing,
I always wanted to try to influence what the audience would see when they're watching dance.
One of the ways you would do that is say to the lighting designer was say, could you put
a spotlight here or a little bit more red there. And then I realized, what if the dancer
themselves illuminated and actually play with the audience to actually create their own
and let the dancer shine from within instead of having the light come on the dancer. So
that's when I started having this idea. And I was working at the time at Bloomberg as
a software engineer. I was writing financial software.
And -- [ Laughter ]
>>Miral Kotb: And so when I told my family I have this idea, my elevator speech wasn't
very good, because you can't really talk about something like that, something you experience.
So when I left Bloomberg to pursue this, it was not something that a lot of people thought
would go anywhere. But I just -- I had a vision, and I just -- I wanted to see it happen. It
wasn't even about the money or it wasn't about just wanting it to be a successful company.
It was just I had something in my heart that I wanted to see come to life, and I put everything
I had on the line. I brought an engineer in, another software developer. And before I knew
it, I had a prototype, and I -- you know, I had a company. And then I started telling
people about it. And then the word spread. And I -- like, my first client was Chris Brown
doing the BET Award. And then all of a sudden, once he saw it, then I had people like the
Black Eyed Peas coming to me. And then what really made a difference was one of my friends
who I rented the software to was approached by America's Got Talent. And then we came
on the TV show. And that's when people started to really see the idea as a dance. Rather
than a technology used by an artist, I was actually the artist. And that's when the company,
I guess, really started to grow. And I guess that's when -- right now, it's just all -- it's
all coming together. I'm starting to really build the brand. And I guess that's -- I guess
that's just the story behind iLuminate. So thank you for having me. And I hope you
enjoyed it. [ Applause ]