Why Dubai, Why Now?

Most people think tax.

That is the wrong answer.

The better answer is about where you want to be standing when the next economic cycle takes shape. Not where life is easiest. Not where the rules are most familiar. Not where you can preserve the most comfort. For me, the sharper question is this: where do you put yourself if you want proximity to the complexity that breeds opportunity?

That is the question that brought me to the UAE.

I moved here at the start of 2025 after leaving my first company. I had options. The United States was on the table, and with embodied AI gathering momentum, it was an obvious place to consider. I had spent time in Singapore in 2024 and could see why it remains such a powerful base for serious builders. But the UAE kept pulling my attention.

There was a strategic pattern emerging that I could not ignore. Over the previous two years, I had been looking at the region through partnerships, capital, strategic buyers and market access. A series of M&A negotiations in the Gulf showed me that the region was different from what I had experienced ten years earlier. It was making the jump from following global trends to helping shape them.

I had also represented the Australian technology sector on a US-Australia trade delegation, engaging senior officials at the White House, National Security Council and US State Department on bilateral investment and technology collaboration. I was an emerging technology player in rooms filled with critical minerals and energy giants, and the signal was obvious. The Middle East was not peripheral to the next decade of trade, energy, technology and capital.

It was becoming central.

Then I arrived, and the thesis became visceral.

Not just visit. Not just optimise. Not just pass through for three meetings and a few dinners. They are coming to start companies, rebuild careers, raise capital, enter new markets, launch second acts and become more serious versions of themselves. That energy matters.

In many mature markets, the conversation has become defensive. How do we protect what we already have? How do we regulate what is coming? How do we reduce downside? Those are legitimate questions, but they are not usually the questions that create the next wave of companies.

The question I keep hearing in the UAE is different. What are you building next?

I love that.

People care about what you have done, but they are more interested in what you are going to do. That suits me because my own career has never been especially linear. I chose the Air Force over the safer university path because becoming an officer and pilot felt like the hardest way to test myself. Before many of my friends had finished their first graduate rotations, I had flown combat transport missions across Iraq and Afghanistan and learnt what it means to make decisions when the stakes are real. After my MBA, I chose the corporate sector over continued steady progression as an Air Force officer. Then I chose the challenge of building an emerging technology company over the pathway to a consulting partnership.

My first company reinforced the commercial version of the same lesson. We built in regulated aerospace, global health and emerging-market logistics, operating across 14 markets and delivering millions of critical medical items in difficult environments. The technology was only one part of the system. The real work sat between regulators, governments, customers, field teams, aircraft, manufacturing, capital and trust.

The complexity created a huge opportunity, but it also taught me the cost of being too far from the problem.

For the first four years, we were roughly twelve hours out of time zone from every dollar of revenue we made. That was not a minor inconvenience. It was a structural penalty. Customers, partners, regulators, field teams and investors were awake while we were asleep. Decisions slowed. Escalations stretched. Trust had to survive too much distance.

Startups are hard enough without standing in the wrong place.

Startups are hard enough without standing in the wrong place.

From the UAE, the map feels different. The Gulf is immediate. India is accessible. Europe and the UK are common practice. Africa is not just reachable from here, it feels addressable. Much of Asia sits inside a practical operating rhythm. Within a few hours, you can reach markets representing billions of people, massive sovereign wealth, deep infrastructure needs and some of the fastest-growing consumer and technology opportunities in the world.

That is not just geography. That is operating leverage.

This matters most when you are building in the physical world. Pure software can sometimes abstract away distance. Logistics, infrastructure, robotics, autonomy, energy, compliance and regulated technology cannot. In those sectors, complexity is not a side issue. It is where the value is created.

That is the deeper thesis.

Comfortable environments rarely produce the most important leaps. The interesting things happen when pressure, talent, urgency, capital and uncertainty collide, then the right people are willing to work inside the fog long enough to build something useful.

Singapore is a useful reference point. In 1965, it had no natural resources, no hinterland and no large domestic market. Its starting conditions forced clarity. Singapore turned geography, trade, infrastructure, governance and trust into strategy. It made itself useful to the world. Spending time there in 2024 reinforced something I already believed: small, well-positioned places can become disproportionately powerful when they understand what the world needs from them.

Penicillin is the life-changing version. Fleming's discovery mattered, but it was the urgency of the Second World War that forced scientists, government and industry to solve the manufacturing problem. A laboratory breakthrough became a mass-produced medicine because uncertainty created necessity.

Complexity does not guarantee innovation.

But it creates the conditions where innovation becomes necessary.

That is how I see the UAE.

The region is not simple. It is expensive, competitive, relationship-driven and sometimes hard to read. Good. The difficulty is part of the opportunity. The GCC opens the door to some of the most complex and consequential markets in the world, including Africa, where the scale alone should make every serious builder pay attention. Africa is home to more than 1.5 billion people, with one of the youngest populations on earth, and a consumer market heading towards trillions of dollars this decade. Small improvements in payments, logistics, agriculture, health, energy and productivity can change lives at scale.

But those markets require proximity, humility and local relationships. You cannot understand them properly from a spreadsheet thousands of kilometres away.

From Australia, Africa was reachable. From the UAE, it feels addressable.

That is the power of proximity to complexity.

From Australia, Africa was reachable. From the UAE, it feels addressable.

The other part is intent. The Gulf is not running a protective agenda. It is not trying to freeze the old economy in place or regulate the future into submission. The most interesting thing about the UAE is that the government is openly running a reform agenda around building the city and economy of the future. Dubai's D33 agenda is not subtle: double the size of the economy over a decade, grow foreign trade, attract investment, and position Dubai as one of the world's leading global cities.

That matters.

Government ambition, capital markets, infrastructure, founders and corporate transformation are pointing in the same direction. That alignment is rare. In many Western markets, technology feels like something being layered onto mature systems that are already politically contested and institutionally tired. Here, the future feels like something being deliberately designed.

That does not remove complexity. It makes the complexity more useful.

Look at the signals. Dubai ranked first globally for greenfield FDI projects for the fourth consecutive year. Dubai International handled more than 95 million passengers in 2025. Jebel Ali connects more than 150 ports globally. The UAE and US announced a 5GW AI campus in Abu Dhabi. The Australia-UAE CEPA is now in force. The UK has concluded a trade deal with the GCC, the first between the Gulf bloc and a G7 country.

This is not lifestyle infrastructure. This is company-building infrastructure.

It is also why the AI era makes this moment more exciting. Silicon Valley concentrated software talent, venture capital and company formation around a platform shift. The AI era will require more than that. It needs compute, energy, regulation, deployment environments, sovereign ambition, customer access and real-world problems worth solving. The UAE is starting to concentrate those ingredients.

That is why anyone building in AI, medtech, infrastructure, robotics, logistics, energy or physical-world technology should pay attention. You can access talent globally. You can build smaller teams with more leverage. You can test in markets where government and enterprise customers are actively looking for the future, not just defending the past.

That is the part I find energising.

This is not lifestyle infrastructure. This is company-building infrastructure.

Since arriving, I have had to rebuild from the ground up. Credibility does not transfer automatically. You re-earn it through presence, usefulness and consistency. Coffees. Events. Introductions. Listening. Showing up again. Understanding what people are building before trying to tell them what you can do.

What I have found here feels closer to the American mindset than the Australian one. People respect experience, but they do not trap you inside it. They want to know what you learnt, but they are even more interested in what you are going to build next.

That is rare.

So why Dubai, why now?

Because people are coming here to build. Because the UAE gives proximity to complexity, and complexity is where the upside lives. Because the markets that matter most in the next decade are closer from here than from anywhere else I have lived. Because AI is changing what small teams can build, and the Gulf is starting to concentrate the capital, compute, energy, government intent and deployment environments that matter in that world.

I did not come here to step away from hard things. I came here because the opportunity to tackle hard things is concentrating here.

And if you are an operator who feels that same pull, you should pay attention.

The UAE is not a place to watch from afar.

It is a place to build from.