At the Seams

Why I’m moving to Abu Dhabi to study the future of global capital

6:10am — London

For most of my twenties, I worked alongside founders building serious companies from places the capital markets had quietly stopped paying attention to. They were smart, technically capable, and had built real things under real constraints. What they did not have was access. Access to capital. Access to the institutional gravity that turns competent execution into compounding outcomes. Access to the rooms where consensus gets formed.

I spent a long time believing my job was to fix that asymmetry one founder at a time. Pick well, advocate, make the introductions that should have been obvious. For a while that felt like enough. Helping individual people find their footing is meaningful work. It is also slow, local, and badly mismatched to the size of the problem.

The shift happened slowly, across cities outside the United States, in conversations whose weight I only understood later. Abu Dhabi. Dubai. Riyadh. London. Zurich. Cairo. Doha. A handful of stops in between. The founders I met there were variations on the same archetype I had been backing in the U.S. Operating in markets that, from the outside, get reduced to a single story. But the conditions around them were different. There was money. There was institutional patience. There was a kind of state-level seriousness about building that I had only ever read about in histories of postwar Asia.

I started to suspect the pattern I had been watching domestically was a smaller version of something much larger.

Countries like the UAE are doing something stranger and, I think, more interesting than most outside observers want to credit. They are using the lag in their own development as leverage, importing what works, declining what does not, and writing rules in real time for problems other countries have already calcified around. Hub71, Dubai Future District Fund, and the broader sovereign-adjacent capital infrastructure are pieces of a deliberate architecture, just to name a few. None of it is accidental. None of it is performative either, which is what surprised me most.

The first time I sat through a meeting in Abu Dhabi and realized the person across from me had been reading more global macro than I had, I understood I was going to have to rebuild some of my mental models. The U.S. model is one of several running in parallel, and the most interesting work of the next era will happen at the intersections between them.

The cleaner way to say it is that capital, talent, regulation, and ambition used to concentrate in a small number of cities, and that concentration is breaking apart. It is being redistributed. There are now several places in the world where the four are converging at once. Most of the frameworks that shaped the last era of finance assume otherwise. They assume the center holds. The center has been quietly relocating for at least a decade.

If you accept that, a lot of career decisions start to look different. The question stops being which firm to join in which city. The question becomes which seams between systems you want to spend the next decade learning to navigate.

I keep returning to that word. Seams. The future, as best I can read it, belongs to people who can operate in the space between things. Between Western capital markets and emerging innovation ecosystems. Between founders and the institutions that fund or regulate them. Between public infrastructure and private entrepreneurship. Between global ambition and local nuance. There is no playbook for that work, because the playbooks were written for a world where you picked one side and stayed there.

Technology is accelerating faster than most of the world can absorb it. The economies with the deepest capital, the densest networks, and the most mature infrastructure are extending their lead, and how the rest of the world keeps up is becoming one of the defining questions of the next twenty years.

The work I find myself most drawn to now sits at the intersection of policy, technology, finance, and economics, in the seat where allocation decisions ripple across populations rather than across cap tables. That seat is held by sovereign wealth funds, multilateral institutions, the major global allocators, and the corners of the large investment banks that actually move capital across borders. The decisions made there shape the access curve for entire regions. That is the room I am working to operate inside of.

There is a strategic dynamic underneath all of this that I am paying close attention to. As the geopolitical environment fractures, large global corporations are going to need market-entry vehicles, regional partners, and acquisition targets in places they cannot easily build into from headquarters. Many of the companies being formed in MENA today are going to become exactly that. Understanding how those companies get built, how they scale, and how they eventually fit into the global corporate map is going to be a real competency. This is still early as a discipline in the U.S. investment world. It’s happening, but ad-hoc, and certainly not at scale. That means the field is still early enough for serious operators to shape it. The first wave of investors and operators to develop it will help shape how the next era of cross-border deal-making forms.

I turned 30 earlier this year. I do not have a clean theory about what that has done to me, but the shape of my decisions has changed. There is less interest in optionality for its own sake. Less patience for environments where I am the most ambitious person in the room without anything to push against. More willingness to make moves that look, from the outside, like detours. Most of the best decisions of the last decade have looked like detours at the time I made them. Leaving comfortable roles. Going to ecosystems that were not yet on the map. Backing founders the consensus had missed. The compounding has shown up later, always later, and almost never in a way I could have predicted.

There is a particular disorientation that comes with a nonlinear career. You do not get the steady drumbeat of external validation that linear careers provide. You learn to generate your own signal, which is necessary, and you also learn to live with longer stretches of ambiguity than most paths require. I have made peace with that. I have not always loved it. The thing that has kept me oriented through the harder stretches is a stubborn belief that meaningful ambition usually requires geographic and psychological movement. You cannot become the person who can do the work you are imagining while sitting in the same room you have been sitting in.

For a long time, I thought the way to create change was to help individuals. One founder at a time. One operator at a time. One check, one introduction, one conversation. I still believe that work matters. I have seen it matter. I have also started to believe, with increasing conviction, that change at scale requires influencing systems. The structure of which capital reaches which places. The norms that govern how diligence gets done. The institutions that decide which talent gets seen. You can spend a career advocating for individuals inside a system that is built to overlook them, or you can spend a career trying to repair the structure itself. The second path is harder and slower and less legible. It is, I think, the only path that compounds.

That reframing is most of what is driving what comes next for me.

In January 2027 I will be enrolling in NYU Stern’s Full-Time MBA at the Abu Dhabi campus. I have been thinking about how to introduce that fact for a while, because the version that reduces to “going back to school” misses almost everything that made the decision feel significant.

Stern is one of the great American business schools, and its one-year program in Abu Dhabi is built on a partnership architecture I find genuinely uncommon. The institutions orbiting the program are the same institutions already shaping the next era of cross-border capital allocation. The program moves between New York and Abu Dhabi across the year, which is to say between the city where most of the world’s institutional capital has historically been deployed and the city where a meaningful share of it is going next. I am not certain another program in the world is organized around precisely that arc, and that structure is most of why I chose it.

What I am hoping to draw out of the program is what no amount of additional operating experience would give me on its own clock. The technical foundation. The institutional fluency. The cohort and faculty network that becomes its own form of long-term infrastructure. The chance to translate a decade of work across technology, venture capital, and operating roles into a form of fluency that compounds inside larger institutions rather than only on the edges of them. I have raised money, deployed money, helped build companies, watched companies break, watched them succeed. What I have not yet done is sit inside the institutions where capital allocation decisions ripple across populations and economies. The MBA is the bridge to that. NYU is betting on me, and I am betting on the institution back.

I have spent most of my career working with people who were undercapitalized relative to their talent. I have come to believe that the bigger version of that problem is systematic. There are entire regions of the world where talent is accelerating faster than the infrastructure around it, and a generation of investors and operators is going to make their careers helping connect those regions to the global system in ways that did not exist before. I am one of those people. The immediate work will run alongside and inside the institutions already deploying capital at the scale this problem deserves. The longer arc is 7C Capital Partners, the firm I am building toward, designed to sit at this intersection in a way that institutions, by mandate and time horizon, cannot.

The next chapter does not run in a clean line. It opens into a wider field. More variables, more risk, more upside, more room to be wrong in interesting ways. I am moving toward it on purpose. The center is moving. So am I.