Survive and Shine
In October, Amber Leong astonished the investors on ABC’s Shark Tank with her story: As a 20-year-old, Leong had ridden a one-way ticket from the outskirts of tropical Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to a snowy Minnesota college, where she beat a life-threatening illness before launching a successful light-therapy company, despite having no engineering experience. Circadian Optics, her $4 million, Minneapolis-based startup, scored a total of $750,000 from Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner. The Sharks even topped their offer with an extra $50,000 for Leong’s parents, who’d cashed out their retirement funds to send her to the U.S. and, eventually, the
