Facebook pioneer Randi Zuckerberg hails UAE's 'exciting environment' for startups

Randi Zuckerberg, former director of marketing at Facebook and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, on Wednesday praised the UAE for creating a unified ecosystem where entrepreneurs, startups and businesses have access to regulators and financiers at the “fingertips.”

“One of the most exciting things about being an entrepreneur here is the opportunity to have things at your fingertips, fashion, media, culture, finance, all together in the same space. Working in the United States, we were very siloed in Silicon Valley. In the US, you have a tech city over here, and then you have to fly six hours to get to the place where policies are being made and fly somewhere else to get to the finance hub or the media hub. To be able to create and build in an area where all of those industries are right next to one another and can share knowledge is really such a gift. This sets this region of the world up for so much success,” said Zuckerberg, who is the sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Abu Dhabi and Dubai have emerged as major destinations to support startups and entrepreneurs in the different fields of technology. The UAE is home of some of the big unicorns that have made the mark globally, thanks to regulatory and financial support provided to those startups to scale up their operations.

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“It’s really exciting what's going on here for entrepreneurs to be able to build in an environment that maybe doesn't have the same regulatory legacy that other countries do, to be able to build that from the ground up,” she said while delivering a keynote address on the first day of the inaugural Abu Dhabi Business Week summit on Wednesday.

“It's very exciting to meet so many entrepreneurs here… I really appreciate the opportunity that's here for all of us with all of this emerging technology,” said Randi Zuckerberg.

She elaborated that it is an essential part of building a vibrant technology hub to make sure that all entrepreneurs have those resources such as those that are available in the UAE and region.

‘There is no overnight success’

Randi Zuckerberg was one of the first few people who joined Facebook at the request of her brother Mark in a small room with just 10 people.

"I think so much of what we see in innovation, we think that it's an overnight success. There's so much pressure on entrepreneurs today to return investment quickly, but I think it's really important to remember that anything truly worth building with the scale of reaching billions of people, there's truly no such thing as an overnight success. Every single thing that's worth building through years and years of foresight and creativity and iteration.

“I had about 20 jobs because I was one of the only non-engineers of the company initially. So, I had about 10 different business cards with different titles on them, depending on who I was meeting with that day, and my entire marketing budget for the first year that Facebook was in existence was one box of T-shirts,” she said.

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