Why periods of global disruption have always been the making of new businesses.
There is a contentious but meaningful quote that goes something like “Never waste a good crisis”. The words have been attributed to Churchill, Machiavelli, and, most recently, Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, during the 2008 financial crisis. Whoever said it first, the sentiment has proven stubbornly, repeatedly true.
Several of the world’s most enduring companies, including Airbnb, Uber, WhatsApp and Slack, were not born in periods of confident, linear growth, but in the wreckage of the 2008 global financial crisis, when capital had dried up, consumer confidence had collapsed, and the prevailing wisdom was to hunker down and wait it out.
They didn’t wait.
And the world they built – the sharing economy, the platform economy, the mobile-first economy – looks nothing like the one that existed before the crash. The disruption didn’t just create urgency – it created permission. Permission to question how things worked, to identify what was broken, and to build something better from the rubble.
That pattern is currently playing out again. The world is navigating a particularly complex set of structural shifts: trade routes are being rerouted, supply chains are being redesigned, and geopolitical alliances are being recalibrated. Global uncertainty, by most measures, is at levels not seen in decades.
The instinct in moments like this is understandable: consolidate, protect, preserve. But the evidence suggests the more interesting response is to build.
When the familiar stops working
What economic disruption does, at its core, is expose gaps. When familiar systems, such as trade routes, financial infrastructure, supply networks and consumer behaviours, are forced to change, they leave behind spaces that didn’t previously exist. And those are spaces that entrepreneurs naturally occupy.
A study published in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy found that the Great Recession of 2008–2009 produced the largest surge in new business formation of any period in a 14-year analysis window. Not despite the economic turmoil but, partly, because of it. When the “good enough” of existing systems visibly fails, the psychological barrier to doing things differently drops.
Consider what Airbnb and Uber actually solved. Not luxury problems, but everyday ones: enabling people who needed to monetise their spare rooms to make rent, drivers who needed income after losing their jobs, and travellers who couldn’t afford hotel prices after taking pay cuts. The recession didn’t create those founders’ entrepreneurial instincts – it revealed them, giving them an audience that was suddenly, urgently ready.
The Gulf’s particular advantage
This is where the Gulf’s story becomes fascinating, and quite distinct from the global narrative.
The GCC nations, and the UAE in particular, have spent the better part of two decades making a deliberate bet: that long-term prosperity cannot rest on a single commodity. That bet has involved building the infrastructure, the regulatory environment, and the institutional appetite to attract not just capital, but people, ideas, and companies. And as global uncertainty has made businesses elsewhere more cautious about where to plant their flags, the Gulf’s comparative advantages have become more, not less, compelling.
Dubai sits at the geographic intersection of Europe, Asia, and Africa – a time zone that keeps global teams in sync and a transport hub that connects to more of the world than virtually anywhere else. The UAE’s Golden and Green Visa programmes have made long-term residency genuinely accessible to founders, investors, and skilled professionals. Free zones offer 100% foreign ownership, zero personal income tax, and regulatory clarity that many more established markets can’t match. And increasingly, what founders describe when they arrive is more than ease of doing business – it’s speed.
What the region has built is a place where founders don’t have to choose between ambition and stability. And in a world where those two things feel increasingly hard to find in the same location, that is a powerful proposition.
What uncertainty does to entrepreneurial thinking
It would be too simple to say that difficult times make for better founders. What they really do is sharpen the questions.
When conditions are good and capital is flowing freely, a great deal of entrepreneurial energy goes into incremental improvements, developing slightly better versions of things that already exist, optimised for a market that isn’t going anywhere. When those conditions shift, entrepreneurs stop asking “how do we make this 10% better?” and start asking “why does this exist in this form at all?” That’s a fundamentally different and more interesting question.
There’s also what happens to talent. As global trade patterns shift and multinational companies reassess their geographic footprints, skilled professionals move. They look for environments that are dynamic, well-funded, and future-focused. Engineers from global tech firms and operators from leading fintech companies are increasingly relocating. The cross-pollination of expertise that results from this kind of talent mobility has historically been one of the most powerful drivers of innovation. And it’s happening here, now.
And then there’s capital. The Gulf’s investor landscape has always leaned toward patient, long-horizon capital, the kind that backs ideas for what they will become over a decade, rather than what they can return in three years. In a funding climate that has become more cautious globally, that orientation proves an advantage. Companies building for durable problems in a region with the capital to support them over the long term are better positioned than ever.
The sectors being remade
Uncertainty tends to concentrate entrepreneurial attention on the problems that genuinely matter. And right now, a handful of sectors are seeing exactly that kind of intensity.
Supply chain intelligence and logistics technology are having a moment, driven by the reality that global supply networks can no longer be designed for efficiency alone but must be designed for resilience. McKinsey’s latest global survey shows that nine in ten companies encountered supply chain disruptions in 2024, with instability now described as ‘the norm, not the exception’. That is not a temporary problem, and it is generating genuine demand for new solutions.
Fintech and alternative financial infrastructure are also accelerating, particularly in a region where the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) has positioned itself as one of the world’s leading financial innovation hubs. Food security and agri-tech are attracting significant investment as the Gulf’s long-term commitment to reducing import dependence deepens. And AI is attracting capital at a scale that reflects how deeply the region’s leadership is committed to it.
These are the structural challenges of the next two decades, and the Gulf is, by design, one of the best-resourced places on earth to work on them.
Building for what’s next
There is a version of the ‘uncertainty breeds entrepreneurship’ story that is a little too tidy, implying that disruption is a gift, that difficulty is secretly good, and that the harder things get, the more founders thrive. That’s not really the point.
The more honest version is that uncertainty clarifies. It strips away the comfortable assumptions that accumulate in good times. It forces a reckoning with what really matters, what genuine problems look like, and what kinds of companies are built to last rather than built to perform well in a particular benign moment.
The founders building right now, in this region and in this climate, are navigating more complexity than their counterparts did five years ago. But they are also building with clearer eyes. They are solving for resilience from the start, not retrofitting it later. They are choosing markets for genuine strategic reasons, not because they were the easiest to enter. And they are doing it in an ecosystem that has spent years preparing for exactly this kind of influx.
Disruption doesn’t create entrepreneurs. It reveals them. And right now, the Gulf is one of the clearest places in the world to see what that revelation looks like.
