From Wall Street to Dubai

By: Gregory BrillSeptember 24, 2008

Wall Street's instability prompted one tech entrepreneur to cast his net wide by heading east – to Dubai. Here, he chronicles his adventures in the hot zone.

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In the technology business, you need to go where you are both valued and loved. Just a few weeks ago, that was Wall Street.

Increasingly as many securities like stocks and bonds became more like commodities, each investment bank tried to distinguish itself from every other by their technology. Who could calculate that CLO (Collateralized Loan Obligations) trade the fastest, who had the "stickiest" and most useful web portals, who could whip up a sophisticated alchemy around a complex swap or midwife some strange exotic within an hour of a client's phone call. We at Infusion, a 200-person consultancy specializing in emerging technology and user-experience design, were both loved and valued: we wrote the tech that widened the spread -- what they like to call the profit margin on Wall Street -- and distinguished our clients.

And then the spread collapsed.

On some level, we had the advantage of seeing it coming. Infusion, in fact, specialized in complex, derivative-based systems, so we worked on the very systems that tracked the mortgage inventory, risk and pricing for a number of the big investment banks. I can't say we were prescient; there was no definitive point where we said, "Whoa! Who's buying this junk?" but there were a number of surreal moments along the way. Time and again, we'd ask how a given security was supposed to be priced in our equation... and you couldn't get a straight answer. Basic questions like "how do we value this" tended to become string-theory discussions as opposed to simple arithmetic. In the end, no one completely knew. But for any answer the front office wanted, they could always find a quant to conjure a financial model that gave them that number.

We became increasingly concerned that too much of our revenue came from Wall Street. Also, we were surprised that we were doing as well as we were, even though people were already talking about a "credit crunch" and housing was sinking fast. And we remembered a lesson from the last big crash of 2001: things are great just before they aren't.

And so I headed east with Infusion's president, Alim. We had heard that in Dubai they valued "the best" whatever that might be. "Hey, that's us!" we thought. And armed with little more knowledge than any dilettante could glean from a 60 Minutes interview with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoun and the oft-parroted factoid, "they have 60% of the world's cranes" we hopped an Emirates flight to take a look for ourselves.

As it turned out, most of what we saw on that first trip was the lobby of the Grosvner House hotel. Even though we'd tried to line up meetings with big companies up there through our scant Dubai contacts (a couple of technology managers who'd moved there from the U.S. and one Canadian dentist) most didn't respond and the few who did wouldn't commit to a date. "Dear Greg. Let me know when you are here." That was often the best I'd get.

When you are in sales mode, there is nothing more frightening than travelling someplace very expensive with an empty Outlook calendar. As we got closer to our flight out, we began to ask, "We've got no meetings with anyone and this is going to cost us twenty thousand per person! Man, what are we doing?"

Those first few days are the most terrifying. You sit by the cascading fountain in the well-adorned lobby of your hotel while one of the many falcon statues -- ubiquitous throughout the Gulf -- stares you down ("You don't belong here!") The hotel staff over-services you, literally running to refill your water with every sip...and you are visited by an ancient anxiety you remember if you ever went to a school dance by yourself instead of with a date. Everyone around you, it seems, has a partner. Repeated scene in every lobby couch and two-chair grouping: the one Emirati in white flowing dishdasha and sandals, nodding, saying little but listening intently to one of two blue-suits who, in German/Russian/South African/French accented English, outlines the grand designs of one thing or another in Strangelovian dialect; Vee kan build 'zis, ya? Vill be, 'ze best in 'vrld!

You, however, try to look busy...watching your inbox in the event an email should slip in before you hear the "ding"... all the while pining for a sheik of your own to dance with.

But if you are patient, and willing to adapt, the tide can turn. When I bemoaned our lack of meetings to one of our contacts, he said simply:

"Did you call them? You have their mobile."

"Can you do that? They never returned my email. Wouldn't that be weird?"

"You have to do that. It is expected. They'll meet with you if you are here...because, technically, you're their guest now."