The UK press has a version of Dubai. I am not sure it went there.

There is a well-worn narrative in British media about the Gulf. Influencers, tax arrangements, veneers. People who left for the sunshine and came back with a podcast. That story is not entirely invented. But it is also not the story I found.

I went to the region in the early stages of building 47X. What I came back with was not a strategy deck. It was a feeling I had not expected.

The place has energy. Real energy. The kind that is very hard to manufacture and very easy to sense when it is missing. People there want to build. They want to move. The default answer to an idea is not why it won’t work. It is what would it take. I have spent my career as an entrepreneur and I have sat in enough rooms in London to know how rare that orientation actually is.

The closest comparison I have is early Silicon Valley. Not the mythology of it. The psychology. A genuine, collective belief that building something from nothing is worth doing and worth doing now.

The region is still finding its rails in some areas. That is true. Nowhere moves this fast without rough edges. But the underlying appetite and ambition is infectious. It is the kind of thing a lifelong entrepreneur finds difficult to walk away from.

I sincerely hope the current conflict does not dampen it. Not only because war is a waste and an infliction on people who deserve better. But because that optimism is a genuinely scarce thing in the world right now. It would be a loss far beyond the economic one.

More from me on what we are building there shortly.