An Egyptian at the center of an American success story: CNN Money’s Octavio Blanco profiles Moawia Eldeeb, an Egyptian who immigrated to the US when he was nine years old and ended up founding SmartSpot, a company that uses interactive mirrors that help athletes train without a human trainer. “Eldeeb and his incredible rise out of poverty was recently honored with the Robin Hood Foundation’s Heroes Award,” Blanco writes. Eldeeb says an explosion in the boiler room of the family’s apartment building destroyed their home and had them move to a homeless shelter. He was working at a pizza restaurant off the books when he was supposed to start ninth grade.

“That year, I went to a public library next to the shelter in Harlem. One of the librarians asked me why I wasn’t in school. She created a whole curriculum for me. For a year, I basically did every single lesson on the Khan Academy website, from pre-algebra until I finished algebra. A year later, we moved to the Queensbridge projects… a local private Islamic high school, tested me and let me attend tenth grade on a full scholarship… I graduated in the eleventh grade.” SmartSpot made it to Y-Combinator, finishing the program by January 2015 and raising USD 1.5 mn by the following May. Eldeeb is worried about the prospects of a Trump presidency: “I worry a lot about the future. He wants to ban people like me from coming here. I would have never had a chance to come here. I worry about leaving and seeing the rest of my family. I might not be allowed to come back in.”