Dubai, UAE- Every ambitious founder eventually asks the same question: who’s in the room with me? Not literally – but who am I surrounding myself with, and are they pushing me to think bigger or holding me at the size I already am?
Increasingly, the answer founders are landing on involves getting on a plane to come to Dubai.
I run business masterminds – rooms where a handful of high-performing founders come together to think, challenge, and solve problems collectively. Done well, a mastermind isn’t just useful; it’s a 10X unlock, because the combined thinking of a room full of great business leaders is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts. What I’ve noticed over the past few years is that people don’t need convincing to travel here for it. They’re already trying to find a reason to come.
Here’s what I think is actually going on.
Dubai thinks in “impossible,” then does it anyway
There’s a particular mindset here, and it starts at the top. The government itself is oriented around achieving what most cities would call unrealistic goals, on timelines most cities would call unrealistic too. When you mastermind in Dubai, you’re in a room with people who’ve either built those things or watched them get built firsthand. Big, audacious execution isn’t the exception here, it’s the local culture. That rubs off. Fast.
People here want you to win – genuinely
There’s a word for this: compersion – taking real joy in someone else’s success, without it costing you anything of your own. Dubai runs on it. Business owners here don’t treat your growth as a threat to theirs; they cheer for it. I hear some version of the same sentence constantly from clients: “I can’t believe how many people actually want each other to win here.” That’s not true everywhere. In plenty of countries, someone else’s success can feel like your loss. Not here.
Exposure changes what you think is possible
A lot of my clients come from small towns, quieter markets, places where ambition has a natural ceiling simply because of what’s visible day to day. Then they land in Dubai, and something shifts. The scale of what’s being built, the speed of it, the sheer appetite for “bigger” – it’s inspiring in a way that’s hard to manufacture anywhere else. You can’t unsee what’s possible once you’ve seen it.
It’s a genuine cultural melting pot – and that’s the point
A mastermind where everyone thinks the same way is a wasted mastermind, it shouldn’t be an ecco chamber.. The real value comes from friction: different cultural instincts, different economic backgrounds, different default ways of solving a problem. Dubai does this better than almost anywhere I’ve worked. You’re not getting one frame of reference in the room, you’re getting a dozen, from a dozen different operating systems.
The mastermind alone isn’t enough – you need a peak experience.
I don’t believe a mastermind should just be goal-sharing and coffee. The real shifts happen through peak experiences – the kind that physically and mentally reset how someone thinks. Over the past two years, I’ve taken mastermind groups deep diving, skydiving, dune buggying, and out into the desert. I’ve watched those experiences change how leaders think about risk, fear, and their own capacity, in ways sitting talking in a conference room simply can’t replicate.
None of this is an accident. Dubai has built an ambitious economy – one where the infrastructure, the culture, and even the government’s own behaviour all reinforce the same message: think bigger, move faster, don’t accept small.
- AS TOLD TO AMIT KAKKAR, MANAGING EDITOR, EMIRATESREPORTER.COM. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED ARE SOLELY THOSE OF THE GUEST.
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