How to create a generation of Gulf ‘angels’

Investment is essential to create a culture of entrepreneurship. But it needs risk-takers

A handout photo of The Kayys, the Qatar-based sisters and designer trio Ghada, Hend and Maha Al Subaey (Courtesy: The Kayys)

The Qatari and Emirati designers who will be showing their designs at the Vogue Fashion Dubai Experience tonight are examples – exemplars, even – of the kind of homegrown entrepreneurial talent that the Gulf needs.

As our Arts&Life section highlights today, several Gulf designers, including the Abu Dhabi-born Maryam Al Omaira and the Al Subaeys, three Qatari sisters, are bringing their designs to the catwalk at Dubai Mall.

Such entrepreneurship, however, needs nurturing, and not merely in the cut-throat world of fashion. Indeed, the real challenge for entrepreneurship in the Gulf region is to create an environment and infrastructure that allows start-ups that no-one understands to be funded.

What does that mean? Fashion is easy to understand – there is a clear product, a method of selling and a mature group of proven customers. But other start-ups – think of those highly technical start-ups that litter Silicon Valley – are very difficult to grasp, even for other entrepreneurs and experts.

A quick look at the startups backed by Oasis 500, a Jordanian early stage investment company which was the first of its kind in the Middle East, shows how many of them are in information technology and mobile apps – both industries that require technical knowledge to understand what is proposed, and, therefore, for investors to understand what might happen to their money.

Building that environment is hard. It requires, firstly, angel investors: people with significant sums who are able and willing to invest in very small businesses, in the knowledge that most will fail. It requires mentoring of start-ups and potential start-ups, so that those with the ideas and talent can go into business.

It requires legal changes, so that trying a business, taking in investment from several individual sources, and then the threat of failing and declaring bankruptcy is an understood part of the process.

And perhaps most of all, it requires an environment where potential investors, especially those who have made their money via big “bold face” names, can easily meet and hear the pitches of those seeking to start small, scrappy, nimble companies. Getting money from friends and family – the traditional way of funding new companies in the Gulf – is only the beginning. The real change in entrepreneurship will come when individuals can easily fund themselves through the kindness of strangers.