Building in the Desert

You don't get a vote. You get the invoice.

Most founders I meet in Dubai build on someone else's AI model. We don't own the infrastructure. We rent it.

Not AI FOMO, as it turns out. Infrastructure FOMO.

The irony is that I left big tech partly because I wanted more freedom over how I spent my time. Instead, I spend a surprising amount of it trying to recreate the infrastructure I left behind.

There's a difference between using AI as a tool to sharpen your thinking and using it as a substitute for thinking.

The question isn't whether it can produce better sentences. It's whether we're still willing to endure the slower, messier process of actually having something to say.

Behavior is evidence.

Turns out building products and staying healthy in your thirties share the same failure mode: overengineering the solution while quietly neglecting the fundamentals.

You don't know what you actually need from a cofounder until you've already lived through getting it wrong.

None of this is complicated. It's just easy to let slide when you're excited about what you're building — which is exactly when it matters most.

She is not an edge case. She is what's coming.

None of them ended up here by accident. They chose this, deliberately, specifically, sometimes against advice, and then they got to work.

I met a founder building an app for bull semen analysis. Not a metaphor. Actual bull semen.

So that's the trade I'm actually making, rebuilding here: less density, less scar tissue, a banking system that treats you like a suspect until proven otherwise — in exchange for a market that's still being shaped.

Here's what nobody tells you about moving somewhere new as a new mom: the loneliness is a specific kind of lonely.

Because I think there are other women doing the same thing in different cities, just at different stages, and sharing this might help me connect with some and feel less lonely.