From Wall Street to Dubai

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In the same way as you really need to be on the trading floor to be useful to the core business of Wall Street, you really need to be in Dubai to be relevant to these people. Otherwise you are one of those countless dopes who fling them an email or a phone call in the hope of being showered with opportunity, after which, you might deign to visit them. They don't appreciate that.

But when you visit in person, with an honest proposition and a willingness to have your claim of "being the best" truly tested, you can get those meetings. At least the first one. If you get a second, you know you did okay.

Any western business with successful operations based in the Dubai (or, for that matter, anywhere in the UAE) will almost certainly have one or more Emirati on staff. Emiratis are the locals (though vastly outnumbered by ex-pats) and collectively they form a very tight network of interrelated families and business concerns. Take any large private entity in Dubai (outside of the massive Dubai Holding company), trace it up, and you will end up at one of a small number of familial names.

Prove to a member of this network that you are genuinely good at what you do, and he might make an introduction for you -- at any level: to the Chairman, to the CEO (they might be cousins or childhood friends), or to a mid-level manager.

One of my contacts got us a meeting with an Emirati who worked as a senior manager at a multinational company, in charge of local accounts. I'll call him Waleed.

Waleed began the meeting with a simple question: "Tell me about yourself. What brings you here?"

I remember speaking for half an hour...going over everything we did on Wall Street, the trading systems, our expertise in this and that technology, our user experience/design focus...on and on, I rambled...it can be disconcerting when you encounter people who would truly rather listen than speak.

At the next natural pause, Waleed leaned back in his chair and regarded us for a long moment. It was somewhat cinematic.

"You don't want to work in finance." He said declaratively. "Here, you want to work with the resorts."

With no further comment, he picked up one of three mobile phones on the desk before him and speed dialed. A quick exchange of gulf Arabic, maybe three minutes, and he put the phone back on the desk. "Ok, you have a meeting," he said.

With that, we were in the resort business.

Well, almost. In reality, it wasn't quite that easy. Many other meetings followed that phone call. The mystery party on the other end of phone had delegated our meeting to his European director who was as tough, smart and discerning as anyone I'd ever worked for on Wall Street. We had to do a proof of concept; our references were thoroughly checked. In fact, it culminated in a plain old and very formal RFP process that we had to win the old-fashioned way: by beating a number of other vendors.

We ultimately secured a truly visionary and terrific client: the kind of company that embodies what this region is all about. They don't want to buy anything off the shelf, they want to build something entirely new. They reason: if we are going to be the world's best, we need a system better than any of our competitors could possibly have.

Wall Street used to be that way. "In the old days" (I guess I can officially say that now) the return on investment for new, transformative technology on the trading floor was so high, it spawned enormous amounts of creativity and innovation; good tech (better than your competitors) equaled huge returns. It meant you could find and drink first of the fabled "alpha pool"...this is what I have heard traders refer to as the limited window of opportunity in some new market or financial maneuver where there is a good spread to be had.

"Alpha" was profit, and you sought "pools" of it wherever you could. These pools don't last lasts long, however, before every competitor sees what you are doing and sticks his straw in and sips until its dry....you have to move on and evolve.

So it is with Dubai. Their original alpha pool, oil, is drying up, and they recognize that technology is key to their evolution (already well underway) from an oil-driven economy to one based on tourism, finance and anything else they can and will invent. The hotels, airlines and government agencies we now work with all understand technology's transformative role.

When I found out Lehman Brothers was declaring bankruptcy, I was watching CNN from a treadmill overlooking the ski lodge at the Mall of the Emirates, where they actually have an indoor ski hill, complete with chair lifts, five different trails and even clouds which form "naturally" in the completely enclosed space.

The treadmill beeped. I checked the time. It was almost midnight over on Wall Street. In Dubai, the day was just beginning.

Gregory Brill is founder and CEO of Infusion Development, a 200-hundred person emerging technology consultancy with offices in New York City, Toronto, Boston, and Dubai. He is the author of several books on technology. You can reach him at gbrill@infusion.com.