Abu Dhabi Felt Familiar
What I learned at Machines Can Think from a young founder, two very different investors, and a question that followed me home.
I landed in Abu Dhabi with a question I didn’t want to admit was inside me, because it makes me feel like the kind of person who can’t enjoy a good thing without cross-examining it: Is this real momentum, or is it performance?
The drive into the city from the airport didn’t answer it. Still, it did give me enough evidence to stay curious – roads that worked, construction that looked purposeful, and a certain confidence you feel when a place expects to be judged on delivery rather than on promises. I’ve seen cities that look busy and remain hollow, and I’ve seen cities that look quiet and are quietly busy building a future. The UAE is making a loud bet, so the only question that matters is whether the bet has substance behind it.
The next morning, I was at Machines Can Think, hosted at the Park Hyatt Abu Dhabi Hotel and Villas, and the venue itself offered its own kind of contrast: sunlight and water outside, panels and ambition inside, and enough people moving from room to room that you could feel something forming in real time. Between sessions, the lobby became a river of introductions—founders making their second impression, investors deciding whether to have a conversation, recruiters scanning for the next person they can place into someone’s story.
That’s where I met Luca.
Not his real name, but close enough to the truth. He’s twenty-nine, European, wicked smart in the way that makes you forget to check whether the person has ever actually run anything larger than a small team. He has never been to the United States but looks forward to it.
Luca’s map includes Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin, and airports. Four years of building data and machine learning models had given him that particular kind of competence that’s common in young technical leaders: he knows what breaks, he knows what’s messy, he knows what people hide. What he didn’t yet have was business scar tissue – those small humiliations that come from selling, pricing, negotiating, and being told “no” by someone who does not care about your intelligence.
He wasn’t trying to dominate the room. He wasn’t overly polished. He had that look I recognize because I’ve worn it myself: a person who has done the homework, arrived in the right place, and is now trying to figure out which doors will actually open.
We were walking between sessions when he asked what I thought of the city.
I told him, almost casually, “It reminds me of the U.S. in the late nineties and the early 2000s – money, talent, ambition, people arriving with something to prove. It can be a good thing. It can also create a lot of noise.”
He stopped walking for a second, the way people do when a sentence gives shape to something they’ve been sensing but couldn’t name. Then he smiled with relief.
“That’s exactly it,” he said. “I’m trying to tell the difference.”
His startup had a narrow focus. No grand claims. He wanted to help logistics operators reduce spoilage and reroute intelligently in hot climates – unsexy work with measurable outcomes. If it worked, nobody would clap. It would simply show up in fewer losses, fewer complaints, and a reduction in small failures that everyone quietly tolerates because fixing them takes time and attention.
We kept walking. It wasn’t a dramatic conversation. It was the kind that happens in motion, when you’re both half-present because you’re trying to find the next room and you’re also trying to decide how honest to be with each other.
“What feels different here,” he said, “is that people answer. You don’t spend weeks trying to decode what a maybe means.”
That made me pause, because he wasn’t talking about friendliness. He was talking about clarity. In too many places, people keep conversations alive because it feels safer than deciding. They like the feeling of being adjacent to something interesting, and they worry that saying “no” closes a door they might want later. So you get polite drift – messages that sound warm and lead nowhere.
Here, Luca was experiencing something rarer: clean replies. Not all “yes.” Not even many “yes.” Just less of the “maybe”.
Then he said the one thing that made me understand why he was uneasy.
“I don’t know which people are real.”
He didn’t say it dramatically. He said it like someone reporting a basic fact. It was the founder’s version of a question most of us carry quietly in unfamiliar gatherings: who is actually here to build something, and who is here because the room is hot, the attention is cheap, there may be money in the room, and nobody wants to miss the moment.
Later that afternoon, he asked if I’d join him for a meeting with an investor. We walked into the main hotel lobby – pleasant, chilled air, expensive light, and the hum of people trying to be casual and calculating. We stood on one side, watching small clusters form and dissolve: founders with practiced optimism, operators with tired eyes, investors moving with that particular calm that comes from knowing you have the money and you can leave at any time.
The investor arrived friendly and polished, the kind of person who makes you feel seen while you’re talking. Luca gave him the six-minute version of his company – what it did, why customers would pay, what he had learned so far, and where he was stuck. It was a good pitch. Luca can think fast, and he doesn’t hide behind fluff. He’s the kind of technical founder who can explain a messy idea without pretending it’s simple.
The investor listened and then asked a single question that revealed his orientation: “What’s the fastest path to exit?”
You could see Luca’s mind split into two tracks. One track said: this is what money wants, this is what you’re supposed to answer to. The other track said: if I answer this too eagerly, I’m agreeing to build my company around someone else’s clock.
Fifteen minutes later, another investor joined. Older, quieter, not interested in being entertained. He didn’t start with valuation or the future. He started with what sounded hard to Luca.
Where does your data come from? How does it change? What happens when a customer uses it in conditions you didn’t expect? What happens if your best engineer leaves? What will you do when a customer says the system is wrong, and their operations team is already angry?
Luca answered well, but I could see something shift in his posture. This was a different kind of conversation. It wasn’t about the money. It was about the work.
At one point, the investor said, almost in passing, “This doesn’t become valuable because your model is clever. It becomes valuable because someone trusts it enough to use it when the pressure is on.”
After the meeting ended, Luca and I walked out together. We didn’t talk for a minute, partly because he was doing the mental sorting founders do: which feedback is real, which feedback is just words, which advice would still make sense months from now.
Then he asked me what he should do.
I hadn’t arrived intending to coach. I came to see the region, feel the energy, and test my own assumptions. But experience does this to you in rooms full of young builders: people decide you must have a map, so they ask you for directions. If you’re not careful, you start acting like you’re there to teach, when the truth is you’re still learning.
I told him the only version of the truth I could.
“Don’t build your company for the person who wants a fast ending,” I said. “That’s their preference. Build it so customers keep using you after the initial novelty wears off.”
He nodded, and then he asked the kind of question that revealed his inexperience: “How do I know which investor I should listen to?”
“You don’t,” I said. “Not at first. You learn by watching what they reward. If someone only wants to talk about the finish line, they’ll push you to cut corners you’ll later regret. If someone wants to talk about the parts that are hard – data, adoption, reliability – they may be annoying, but they’re at least living in the same reality as your customers and your engineers.”
He looked at me for a second and then said, quietly, “I’m good at the product. I’m not good at this part.”
There was no self-pity in it.
And this is where I became the accidental coach, because once someone says that, I feel compelled to give them something useful.
“Your advantage,” I told him, “is that you don’t need to fake competence. Your risk is thinking that competence is enough. This part” – I waved at the lobby, the introductions, the money – “this part is its own skill. You’ll get better. Just don’t let it decide what you build.”
We stood there for another minute, and he asked two more practical questions about hiring and how to avoid being pulled into the wrong conversations. I answered as honestly as I could, and then he said something that surprised me with its simplicity.
“I needed someone to say that. Thank you.”
I laughed because it was either that or turn it into a sentimental moment in a hotel lobby, and I’m not built for that.
“Then I’ve accidentally provided value,” I said. “Please don’t tell anyone. It’ll ruin my reputation.”
He smiled, and in that smile I saw real gratitude from someone smart enough to know what he doesn’t yet know, and brave enough to ask for it anyway.
The next morning, I had my own reminder that the story isn’t just about founders and investors. I was leaving a session when a young engineer stopped me in the hallway. He wasn’t pitching. He wasn’t networking. He was trying to understand what kind of life he could build here.
“What should I get good at,” he asked, “if I want to still matter in five years?”
That question forces the only test that counts.
A fast-growing place can import talent. It can import capital. It can generate excitement. The harder thing is turning those into continuity – careers, mentoring, companies that last long enough to teach people how to build, and institutions that make trust a normal expectation rather than a special feature.
And then there are the millions no one is looking at.
At the conference, “one million” came up more than once – not as a slogan, but as a target. The UAE has publicly talked about training one million people in AI skills by 2027 through a nationwide program launched with Microsoft, and Dubai has its own “One Million Prompters” push aimed at prompt and AI tool literacy. Those numbers are ambitious anywhere. What’s different here is that they’re stated out loud, with timelines, like something someone will be held to.
This isn’t just a UAE challenge. It’s a global one. Most countries are going to discover, late, that they have two shortages at once: deep AI specialists, and the far larger group of managers and operators who need enough practical literacy to use these tools without being fooled by them. The UAE is simply more explicit about the scale of the catch-up.
By the time I left, my answer to my own opening question had sharpened.
The energy is real. The ambition is real. The seriousness is real in enough rooms that it can’t be dismissed as just theater.
But the failure mode is also real: speed can create a lot of winners who never learn to build anything sturdy, and a lot of talent that never feels settled enough to commit.
Luca taught me that in a way no keynote could. And I learned about the UAE, the region, about the quality of its ambition, and about the kind of people it attracts when the bet is big enough.
I didn’t leave with certainty. I left with something better: a clear sense of what to watch, and a little more respect for what it takes to turn excitement into something durable.
Enjoy your loved ones and the rest of your day!
And thank you for spending some of it with me.
Warm regards,
Adi
This nails something I've run into at least a dozen times. That contrast betwen the exit-focused vs. sustainablity-focused investor isn't just two philosophies, it's two completely different timelines for what success even means. Luca's confusion makes total sense becuase he's getting rewarded for opposite things in the same week. Been there, and it messes with how you prioritize real quick.