Confirmed SPEAKERS

Great startups do not begin with a moat — they earn one. In a market that is slower to believe and quicker to scrutinize, this session explores how founders move from an initial wedge to something more durable: winning early conviction, finding real customer pull, and building the product, positioning, and distribution that compound over time. We’ll look at how startups go from merely promising to genuinely defensible.

Capital is moving — across sectors, across borders, and away from where it sat even a year ago. This panel brings together allocators from North America and MENA to examine where that movement is actually heading: which shifts are structural and likely to hold, which are simply fashionable and likely to fade, and where the two regions are reading the same signals differently. The discussion will reveal where conviction is forming, where consensus is fragile, and how regional capital views the next cycle differently.

AI is not just changing how companies are built; it is changing who owns the bottlenecks, who captures the upside, and what becomes valuable when intelligence itself becomes abundant. This conversation looks at the deeper power shifts beneath the AI boom, from compute and infrastructure to labor, ownership, and control. We’ll explore what kind of economy is emerging — and who is really positioned to shape it. If intelligence becomes cheap, what becomes scarce?

The AI cycle is creating enormous value, but where that value lands is far from settled. As companies stay private longer, raise at public-market scale, and the secondary markets delay IPOs, the old sequence is breaking. This debate puts public-market price discovery against private capital's illiquid conviction — who captures the upside, who absorbs the downside, and who even gets access. Two camps, one cycle. Will you pick a side?