A new silicon valley

People in Silicon Valley think big because they have trillion-dollar tech companies that grew from scratch in their backyard. It makes those immense goals feel possible. It adds a whole new dimension to what kinds of problems are worth working on.

Most people here are just 0-3 degrees removed from the people responsible for those companies. Yes, there are the immediate effects from this clustering that people talk about, with learning from the best people, the saying that the cure for cancer lives in a few pieces in different people’s heads, you just need to combine them.

But it also does something subtler, but just as important. It humanizes those people. Zuck was just a college student, so why does age matter? I met Brian Chesky and shook his hand. He’s shorter than me. I was talking to someone recently about how he felt scared to go up to Joe Lonsdale, who was his boss. Then someone else told him “Joe’s just a dude.” It makes you feel like you have more agency to change things.

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” – Jobs.

It’s an overused quote, but summarizes the sentiment quite well.

No one thought running a 4-minute mile was possible. But once someone did it, then everyone started doing it. Because you show people those huge goals are possible, and then people who meet you notice they’re not so different from you.

In the Middle East, the biggest tech companies are Careem, Noon.com, Tabby. Uber for the Middle East, Amazon for the Middle East, Klarna for the Middle East.

These are copycat ideas that benefitted from regulatory and cultural moats and were therefore limited to that market and prevented from expanding beyond.

The Middle East exports oil but doesn’t export ideas in tech yet.

I would define a new Silicon Valley as a dominant exporter of ideas as well as the implementation of those ideas. These ideas must have two qualities: be novel, and create value. Maximizing both of these things is important: it should feel like being in this Silicon Valley feels like you’re 1-2 years ahead of the rest of the developed world.

Let Shams be a new successful company in the UAE. You know you’re making progress when someone says, I’m going to build a Shams for America, the way one would say “Uber for the Middle East.”

You know you’re winning when people stop calling you the “Silicon Valley for the Middle East.”

Florence led the Renaissance, but no one calls Silicon Valley the Florence for America.

Could we make a new silicon valley? The tailwinds are in place. The UAE has the infrastructure, the capital, the energy, and friendly immigration laws.

They also have the mindset. Dubai embodies a startup city. Fifty years ago it was sand, now it’s Dubai. Abu Dhabi was Dubai’s VC, and now it’s paying dividends.

They’re missing the talent. But they don’t have to be. It’s not a zero-sum game. Silicon Valley gets a fraction of the top talent in the world.

Thousands of potential Musks and Huangs in India, Africa, East Asia don’t have the opportunity or means to get educated, meet the right people, and go after solving the problems they see in the world.

The US is making it harder and less attractive for them to come. They don’t treat immigrants well, but still, people clamor to come to America. Need to offer a better alternative.

Need a spark to light the gas that’s building up. The main blocker is the lack of tech talent.

I think this spark needs to be a $100B tech company built in the UAE.

Will need to machete through the woods to find and attract the right talent to start with. But if done correctly, you can open the floodgates of talent from the IITs of India and convert them into the Stanford of UAE.

Software is changing. It’s going from just organizing information to doing labor.

AI is able to do entire cognitive workflows that would take teams of people to do before. It’s like what Excel did to human analysts who were being used as calculators. Stop doing the individual calculations.

Analysts in finance now think more about the overall design of the financial model and manage digital employees that do all the calculations for them far faster and far more accurately than they could themselves.

AI can take an ambiguous task, break it down, and complete it. It can be disciplined to do so extremely well.

The application for this is in every vertical industry. Who doesn’t want to be able to double their workforce of 10,000 people for the cost of an extra 10 people? People have unlimited wants, limited resources, so we will not be firing people, we’ll be solving more problems and creating more wealth.

Currently, the default is that Silicon Valley accrues a disproportionately large proportion of the wealth and power this will create. We need to democratize this and prevent the wealth gap from growing too much.

So which industry to apply AI to?

Well, what is UAE and the Middle East’s largest industry? Energy. Oil and gas.

If you ask me, the best thing the UAE could do is enable a SWAT team of forward-deployed engineers to work with the top management of ADNOC to figure out how to build products that work. I cannot stress this enough, currently 90% of enterprise AI in America is fugazi. But there are companies like Decagon, Harvey, Bland that are building stuff that works, proving it’s not a bubble. Glean just went from $1M-$100M in 3 years building enterprise search.

Keep security as top of mind, but push to move quickly. Go into the highest leverage teams and find out how to generate more revenue, do things faster, more efficiently. Have the engineers work from the same offices as the end-user of their products, so they deeply understand the nuances of their job and apply their engineering brain for how they could improve processes.

Every workflow being done by people should be broken down and analyzed for how it can be done faster and better today. Essentially, instead of using an HR team to grow the team’s output by hiring a new person, you use the tech team to build you a new digital employee.

What does this look like?

Traditional ML would be a list of prioritized alerts for a company representative: what is going wrong and how important are the alerts?

Gen AI can convert that list of alerts into a list of solutions: just approve the action if the LLM got it right.

For example, if there’s a gas leak in a control room, the AI won’t just alert you, it’ll recommend a solution. “Suggested fix: control the ventilation so you can suction off the gas safely. Approved? Done.”

Then do this for the government. Move into holding companies.

There is easily $10B of revenue potential within 5-10 years if executed by a brilliant team.

Palantir’s biggest private contract is British Petroleum. $3B over 4 years. From just one customer.

Unshackling the talent in the East will be crucial to make sure they also benefit from the potential of AI before the wealth gap grows too wide.