🔓 Support our independent coverage of the MENA startup and VC ecosystem.
What a couple of days, ey?
On one tab, breaking news alerts about missile trajectories and Iranian drone strikes. On another, a Slack message from a product manager asking if Tuesday's release is still going ahead. On a third, your friend sending a TikTok making light of the whole ordeal. On a fourth, a WhatsApp from your mother asking if it's true that half of Dubai is leaving.
A week ago I couldn't have told someone the difference between a cruise missile and a ballistic one, or explained what a Patriot battery does versus THAAD, and now I'm fluent in a vocabulary I was largely content to leave to Palmer Luckey and the right-wing impact investing arm of a16z, American Dynamism.
That, by and large, was the texture of this week, and if you're reading this from somewhere else entirely, I want you to understand something before we go any further – it was strange in a way that is genuinely difficult to explain.
The strangeness was not the fear, which was present but manageable, it was the normalcy that kept reasserting itself between the fear, the way the cafés stayed open and the whirring orange, yellow and green liveries kept whirring through muted roads, and children kept laughing and chasing each other around park benches while their parents sat nearby with careful, composed faces and eyes that kept sneaking upward, until sudden jolts in the sky would send everyone hurriedly inside while, somewhere above the Gulf, the air defence systems were doing what they were built to do.
The direct, tangible impact on the ecosystem came on Sunday evening, when an AWS data centre in the UAE was struck by what the company would only describe as unidentified objects. By Monday morning, the outage had spread to a second AWS cluster in the UAE and parts of its Bahrain infrastructure.
Sarwa was down, Stake was down, Alaan was down, Abhi was down, Ziina was down, Hubpay was down, Baraka was down, Careem had lost rides and payments, ADCB had lost its app, the CMA had suspended trading on both stock exchanges, and AWS was telling customers to move their operations to entirely different parts of the world, which is not how any of this is supposed to work.
If the facility was indeed hit by conflict-related debris, it would be the first time a major American cloud provider's infrastructure has been knocked offline by military action.
And while I’ve written Founder Playbooks and VC Playbooks, I have to confess that it never dawned on me to cover what to do when your city is under aerial bombardment and you are trying to keep a company alive, and support your portfolio while in many cases coming to grips with the surreal reality of war for the first time in your life.
Slowly but surely UAE fintechs have started to come back online with varying degrees of functionality. I've spoken to many of these companies' founders today, and I'll be bringing you the insider perspective in a special edition on Friday.
But I've also had the chance to reach out to founders and investors just to ask how they're getting on, how they're handling things.
Everyone's favourite builder-in-public, OCTA's Jon Santillan, admitted that he hadn't really fully reflected on what's happening yet, a sentiment pretty similar to my own.
"What's strange is how quickly life resumes between those moments. One minute you're processing the news, reading WhatsApp groups, the next you're back on a product call, an investor catch-up, or working through something with the team. For me it creates a mix of emotions. There's concern for the people around you and what's happening in the region, but at the same time there's also a responsibility to keep showing up for your family, the team, and the company you're building."
"I'm the eldest son in my family, and my siblings are here as well. My kids are here too, and some of our team are spread across the region, including Lebanon and Saudi. In moments like this, the last thing I'm thinking about is myself. My focus is making sure the people around me are okay. I try to stay calm and make sure people know they can reach out and talk if they need to."
🔓 Support our independent coverage of the MENA startup and VC ecosystem.
Omair Ansari at Abhi (YC S21), the earned wage access platform and one of the companies directly hit by the AWS outage, has handled things with a similar mindset. "Our first focus was safety of our staff and their families," he told me.
Work-from-home was instituted straight away, with regular safety checks going out via Slack and WhatsApp every few hours, everyone confirming they're okay. Employees have access to coaching and psychological support, which Abhi already had in place, and are being offered financial assistance for whatever they need, whether that means helping them leave the country or simply making sure they feel supported.
There is, of course, the question that hangs over every employee in every startup in the region right now, which is what this means for the business and by extension what it means for their jobs. Omair held a town hall today specifically to answer it: "Please, don't worry. There is no cash constraint on the company. There is no financial burden on the company. We have an infinite amount of runway to keep the lights on."
That kind of reassurance is easy to give and hard to mean but in Abhi's case, it comes from somewhere specific. "This is not the US. This is not developed markets," Omair told me. "We started a business in Pakistan, one of the most volatile countries when it comes to economics and politics. We went through a national crisis, both political and economic. Came out the other side alive."
That experience has left him with a conviction that the key to building in emerging markets is surviving through the downturns, "which are inevitable and a hundred percent guaranteed," and it has meant that Abhi holds significantly more cash reserves than a typical investor would like to see. "But it's for these exact reasons we always do that."
He has turned down term sheets from investors who pushed the grow-at-all-costs mantra. "That's not the kind of business we're trying to build." This week, that decision is paying for itself.
The investor side of the equation looks similar. Hasan Haider, managing partner at Plus VC in Bahrain, has been hearing explosions and feeling shockwaves since the first days of the strikes. "I honestly feel lucky to be here rather than anywhere else," he told me, "and while others may be considering leaving, I will be staying put."
At Plus VC, they have given people time to process and adjust, not expecting anything from anyone until they've found their footing. "Humans are good at finding a new normal," he said. "Only then can we consider getting back to work in a real way."
"I'm hoping that things resolve sooner rather than later, but if this is our new normal, let's adjust, feel safe, and continue to build what we set out to build."
I also want to be honest about something that I haven’t really seen anyone say out loud yet, which is that alongside the fear and the concern and the solidarity there is also, if you are being truthful with yourself, a frustration, a low and guilty frustration at the momentum that has been curtailed, at the deals that are paused and the conversations that are on hold and the content calendar that no longer makes sense and the growth that was building and is now, for reasons entirely beyond anyone's control, not.
I feel it, despite knowing full well that I am in an insanely privileged and fortunate position when there are missiles and drones in the sky and people elsewhere dealing with casualties, fatalities, and things that dwarf anything I am describing here.
I suspect a lot of founders and operators reading this feel it too, and I suspect most of us also feel guilty about feeling it, because how can you be frustrated about your pipeline when the region is dealing with something so much larger than your pipeline, and the answer is that you can, because you are human and your work is how you make sense of the world and when the scaffolding around your daily purpose gets shaken it is disorienting in a way that coexists with, rather than competes with, the bigger fears.
I have spent parts of this week not knowing how to operate, not knowing whether it is appropriate to send a sponsorship email, or chase an invoice, or pitch a podcast guest, because the normal calculus of professional outreach (is this a good time, will this person be receptive, am I being respectful of their attention) has been completely scrambled by circumstances that nobody has a manual for, and the instinct to be delicate and considered keeps running into the reality that you still have a business to run and people who depend on it.
I thought we had firmly put the pandemic era phrase "new normal" to bed somewhere around 2021, but apparently not, because here it is again, uninvited and unwelcome, and it turns out the phrase was never really about COVID, it was about the universal human experience of having the ground shift beneath you and needing a name for the period in which you figure out where to put your feet.
There is, I think, some solace in the honest admission that none of us really know what we are doing right now, that the founders and investors I spoke to this week were not operating from some elevated plane of crisis-hardened certainty but were, like the rest of us, figuring it out as they went, making decisions with incomplete information, prioritising people over platforms, and extending to each other a kind of grace that comes not from confidence but from the shared recognition that everyone is navigating the same unfamiliar territory at the same time.
The system, it turns out, is resilient, not because the infrastructure held (it didn't) or because anyone had a plan for this specific scenario (they didn't) but because the people inside the system keep showing up, keep checking on each other, keep rebuilding what breaks, and keep doing the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping things alive while the sky does things that the sky is not supposed to do.
🔓 Support our independent coverage of the MENA startup and VC ecosystem.
