Crisis Is a Feature of Middle East Business, Not a Bug

For anyone tracking capital in the Gulf and the wider Middle East, there is a quiet irony in how many founders treat crisis planning like a fire drill: mandatory in theory, ignored in practice. Growth is the obsession — winning customers, hiring talent, launching products, closing rounds. Disruption is someone else’s problem, until it is not. But in a region where a drone strike, a currency wobble or a regulatory edict can redraw the map overnight, resilience is not a corporate checkbox. It is the operating system of survival.

Ayman Gomaa, founder of Acacia Innovations Technology, knows this better than most. His background is special operations — 21 years of it — where crisis was not an interruption to the job but the job itself. Writing in Wamda, he argues that the strongest businesses are not those that react fastest but those that prepared their people, systems and decision-making before the pressure arrived. The data backs him up. PwC’s Global Crisis Survey finds that 95% of business leaders expect a crisis, yet nearly a third dedicate no staff to preparing for one. Seven in ten believe they would recover well. Only a third actually have the foundations in place. And yet more than 40% emerged from a crisis stronger than before. The difference is rarely luck. It is preparation.

What makes the MENA context different is that crises here do not arrive one at a time. A geopolitical shock can hit a supply chain in one country, crater customer demand in another and freeze fundraising everywhere — all in the same week. A regulatory shift in a single market can force a company to rethink its entire expansion thesis. For startups operating across multiple jurisdictions, the risks overlap and compound. Gomaa’s framing is useful: a disruption stresses the system, an incident breaks part of it, and a crisis threatens the whole. The ladder is climbed not just by the scale of the event but by how quickly decision time evaporates and how much improvisation is forced. In that sense, every MENA founder is already in training — whether they know it or not.

Leadership is where most crises are won or lost, and it is the part founders least prepare. Experience is a trap. Skills built under normal conditions — when meetings run on time, cash flows and the stakes are moderate — do not automatically translate to a situation where a wrong call in an hour can sink the company. Gomaa’s metaphor is vivid: everyone sees the truck, but it is the snake that kills you. The truck is ransomware, the obvious attack. The snake is an employee’s credentials leaking through a third-party breach, then quietly used later with a valid password. In one case he cites, leaked credentials were caught before they were weaponised. The instinct was to treat it as an IT problem. But the real decisions were leadership ones: force a company-wide reset, communicate the risk, take responsibility. Technology triggers the crisis. Leadership decides the response.

For the billionaires and family offices watching this region, the takeaway is blunt. The startups that scale in the Middle East are not the ones with the flashiest product or the biggest round. They are the ones that treat resilience as a capability, not a contingency. That means building trust before it is needed, running debriefs after every stumble, and accepting that a crisis will test the same foundations every time: leadership, decision-making, communication and adaptability. In a region where disruption is the norm, the premium is on founders who have already fallen to the level of their preparation — and found it acceptable.

The forward-looking signal is clear. As more capital flows into MENA tech, from Riyadh to Dubai to Cairo, investors are starting to ask a different question. Not just “what is your growth plan?” but “what happens when the snake strikes?” The founders who can answer that honestly, with systems and people already in place, will be the ones who turn disruption into advantage. The rest will learn the hard way that in this region, crisis is not an event. It is the weather.