The UAE is the Builder’s Capital. Here’s Why

I’ve started more than a hundred companies. Thirty of them are still running. Most people think about the first number and think it is a story about ambition. But, I hope you noticed the second. In most markets, failing seventy times would end your career. It didn’t end mine. In many ways, it built it.

This is what I think people misunderstand when they compare places that help builders thrive. They compare how easy it is to build a first business. To be fair, the cost of the first attempt is roughly the same everywhere.

You will work the same long nights, whether it is in Lagos, London or even the UAE.The odds don’t suddenly become kinder because you’ve changed countries.

What changes is the cost of the second attempt. That’s why I call the UAE the builder’s capital. Because, a builder is not an entrepreneur who builds and thrives on one business. A builder is an entrepreneur with the gut to build more businesses.

Think about what building again if you failed the first attempt looks like in most markets. Closing the first company can take months, sometimes years. The failure sits on the record and follows you into rooms you haven’t even entered yet. Banks remember. Investors focus on that story and they won’t listen to the next one. The people who believed in you the first time, quietly stop answering.

Some markets have long memories for the wrong reasons.

Failure becomes information about who you are. You won’t be measured for what you have learnt from it. It’s nothing personal. It’s simply how those ecosystems are designed to act.

In a world of such markets, the UAE stands out. It rewards the willingness to build again because it recognises potential.

There are three things that make the second attempt chapter here. And none of it is about the tax rate.

1. The Jurisdictions Compete For You

When we launched the first public-private free zone in the UAE back in 2-17, some of the established free zones worried about their market share. I understood the concern.

I just thought they were looking at the problem through too narrow a lens.

Today, dozens of jurisdictions compete for the same entrepreneur. Not because they’re trying to outdo one another, but because every new business strengthens the ecosystem they’re part of. When jurisdictions compete for builders, everyone builds more.

Starting again becomes faster, simpler and less expensive.

In the UAE, competition isn’t happening against the builders. It’s happening for them.

2. Relationships Outlive Businesses

This is the part that visitors often mistake for friendliness. It isn’t. Its proximity. The investor, regulator, distributor and the customer are often only a conversation apart. More importantly, if one idea didn’t work, they are keen to hear the next idea.

During the pandemic, I found myself speaking to competitors almost as often as colleagues. We exchanged advice. Shared what was working. Helped each other navigate uncertainty.

On paper, we were competing. In reality we were investing in the same ecosystem. Because here’s what ecosystems understand.

Sometimes your business doesn’t make it. But, your relationships that build your next business will.

3. The Market Keeps Expanding

When we were building that free zone in 2016, the UAE was home to just over nine million people. Today it’s home to well over eleven million.

That’s millions of additional customers, employees, founders and investors entering the same ecosystem. Now, there’s more founders, more investors and even more capital that has found its way into the ecosystem.

Your second attempt isn’t chasing the same opportunity as your first. It’s chasing a larger one.

Final Thought

If you strip everything else away, the three advantages I’ve described all do one thing. They protect something far more valuable than any individual business. They protect the builder.

Because businesses will come and go. Ideas will succeed and fail. Markets will rise and fall.

But if the builder is still standing, there’s always another company to build.

That’s why I believe the UAE is the Builder’s Capital. Not because it promises you’ll succeed.

Because it invests in the one asset that creates every successful company, the builder.