Guest Articles

If you have known me through the British Chamber of Commerce, you will know that I am well networked and curious, and that I pivoted from one industry and one boardroom into many. Every session, every meeting and every programme teaches me something, and recently I was in a meeting with a client from South Africa raising funds for his growth in the UAE. He has an excellent, well proven model, and he wanted to raise what he called a nominal amount, a seven figure sum that several people advising him had called ‘small’. It is easier if you raise five times that, they told him. I put a version of the same suggestion to him myself. What if we aimed to raise more, and grow faster, or bigger, I asked. “David”, he said, “I want a kudu, not a unicorn”.

A unicorn is the private company valued at a billion dollars or more that Silicon Valley built its mythology around: rarity, rapid growth, aggressive fundraising, outsized returns. A kudu is one of Africa's most recognisable antelope, resilient, adapted to its environment, built to thrive over the long term rather than through explosive growth. The phrase has emerged among South African founders as a deliberate rejection of the first model in favour of the second, a preference for a profitable business over a highly valued one, and for enduring value creation over a headline number. 

It is really a mindset rather than a metaphor. A unicorn asks how quickly it can become worth a billion dollars. A kudu asks how it builds a business still thriving in twenty years. Once I understood that, the more interesting question for me was not South Africa's answer to it, but ours.

So, how can this thinking be applied here in the UAE. There is this misplaced preconception by so many who don’t understand the region fully (this is some of our job in the BCCD to help) that there is cash in abundance, a place where people can come and make a quick buck and leave wealthy. Well, it’s true that there is an abundance of appetite, that the UAE is deep within a generation of entrepreneurship with a continued vision to out think, outperform and deliver on dreams, but one mustn’t be fooled. It’s hard work. The businesses that have kept building through a sustained and difficult geopolitical period, one that has made conflict, disrupted trade routes and shifting alliances a near constant backdrop across the wider region, have not done so by accident. They have done it through the same discipline the kudu represents, applied under considerably more pressure than a founder in a calmer market ever has to demonstrate.

This is where an organisation like the British Chamber of Commerce Dubai earns its place. Its work sits in two areas that matter more in a period like this than in calmer ones. It shortens the distance between a member and the market access, intelligence or introduction that a shifting regulation or a sudden geopolitical development can make urgent overnight, and it holds a network together so that members are not making decisions about how to respond to volatility alone. Neither function makes headlines. Both are, for a great many businesses here, the difference between reacting to uncertainty and having already prepared for it.

Not many people here know what a kudu is, so I went looking for the local parallel, something that could carry the same ambition to raise real capital while showing why we were not chasing the biggest number purely for its own sake, and that what we were doing was prudent, while still matching the ambition of the region. 

The falcon is the national bird of the UAE and carries deep cultural significance. A unicorn is valued because it is rare. A falcon is valued because it is trained, trusted and performs consistently. To say you are building a falcon, not a unicorn, means the same discipline, expressed through a different symbol: you build a business that earns trust through consistent performance.

The UAE has created an environment where businesses can scale quickly, but the strongest companies are built on execution, with value in mind over excitement. Capital is available, but investors still expect discipline. Regional expansion matters more than chasing valuation milestones, and relationships and reputation carry long-term value, because sustainable profitability creates greater resilience through economic cycles. A company built on these principles may never become a billion dollar unicorn, yet it can become an exceptional business, with strong profitability, trusted partnerships and lasting regional influence, and the region already holds a great many examples of exactly that.

Where a unicorn chases valuation, a falcon earns trust. Where a unicorn puts growth first, a falcon puts performance first. One is fundraising driven, the other execution driven. One is built for attention, the other for endurance. One measures success by valuation, the other by lasting value. 

In Emirati culture, a falcon is admired because of what it represents. It does not waste energy. Instead, it waits, assesses the opportunity, and commits with absolute intent when the moment is right. Precision, discipline, patience, focus, loyalty and consistent performance describe the falcon, and they describe just as well the kind of founder, and the kind of investor, this region increasingly rewards, and has needed, through a period when that discipline has counted for more than usual. 

That is the case worth making to any founder raising capital here: not for the smallest number that will get a deal done, and not for the largest number that will turn heads, but for the number that matches what the business can actually execute, and the discipline to know the difference. A unicorn is a story someone tells about a company. A falcon has to prove itself again every time it flies. As this region's business culture matures through a genuinely difficult period rather than a comfortable one, that is the distinction worth paying attention to.

It is the same distinction I look for in every leader I work with in my practice Oraculi. 

Author: David Singleton, Founder of oraculi.co