Amir Farha

I’m not one for PR much, but we just announced our first fund on TechCrunch - a big thank you to everyone for their messages and show of support! It means so much to us 🙏 We did our final close a year ago and after nearly 3 years of investing, over 20 companies in the portfolio, and more than 30 awesome founders we’re working with, it’s been an eventful experience so far... and we’re just getting started. For those interested in reading our journey raising COTU Champions Fund I, we wrote up our thoughts and learnings in the post below. Despite all the challenges that the region and the world is facing recently, we believe that we are at an inflection point in the growth of our ecosystem, and are excited by what the future holds. Nothing worth doing comes easy. We know what it takes and we’re in it for the long haul 🚀 @afarha/reflections-on-raising-a-50m-vc-fund-8ea9ef86a8f5" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@afarha/reflec…

@FredKempe @grok summarize

Smart piece by Steven Cook on how U.S.-Iran War has changed dynamics forever for Saudi, Qatar, and the UAE. foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/10/gul…

You have no experience. You’ve never started a company. You’ve never had a full time job. Nike is going to kill you. You’re a kid. You don’t have technical skills. You shouldn’t build hardware. Apple is going to kill you. You can’t build hardware. You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively. Athletes don’t care about recovery. Under Armour is going to kill you. It won’t be accurate. You don’t listen. You’re an ineffective leader. You can’t recruit great talent. You’re going to have to pay every athlete. You can’t measure sleep non-invasively. It’s too expensive to research. Athletes are a small market. The product costs too much to make. The product costs too much to sell. Your valuation is too high. Consumers aren’t going to want it. Hardware is too hard. You should measure steps. Fitbit is going to kill you. You can’t build a marketing engine. You can’t raise enough money. You need a real CEO. Google is going to kill you. You can’t be a subscription. You can’t build a brand. You can’t do consumer in Boston. Your valuation is too high. You shouldn’t make accessories. You shouldn’t make apparel. Lululemon is going to kill you. You can’t predict Covid. Stay in your niche. You are going to run out of money. You can’t build a health platform. Amazon is going to kill you. You can’t measure blood pressure. You can’t get medical approvals. The market is too small. You don’t understand AI. The market is too competitive. It won’t work internationally. The supply chain is too complicated. You can’t build an AI. You can’t raise enough money. It’s too competitive. Healthcare isn’t going to want it. … Just keep going ✌️

Gong grew from $200k ARR to $200M ARR and $7.2B valuation in a 5 year span. Buyers told us our demos were 2nd to none. 9 lessons I learned about SaaS demos I'll never forget:

My first article in 9 years is a love letter to the UAE. This crisis will pass and we’ll come back stronger. semafor.com/article/03/16/…

Software isn’t merely technical work anymore. It’s creative. Introducing Replit Agent 4. The first AI built for creative collaboration between humans and agents. Design on an infinite canvas, work with your team, run parallel agents, and ship working apps, sites, slides & more.

To all those who call the UAE home and guests in our beloved nation. The UAE places its security and the protection of all citizens, residents, and visitors at the very top of its priorities. With God’s grace, the UAE is fully prepared to confront these threats. I extend my deepest appreciation to our brave armed forces, our committed security services, and all national institutions and teams working tirelessly to keep our country safe. They represent the highest standards of readiness and cooperation. We are truly proud of them. I would also like to underscore my sincere gratitude for the awareness shown by our community of Emiratis and our resident brothers and sisters, partners in this nation, who have expressed their genuine love and loyalty to the UAE through both words and actions. In the UAE, everyone is Emirati through their love for this land and their contributions to it. May God have mercy on the victims and grant the injured a speedy recovery. With God’s blessing, the UAE—the land of Zayed—will remain strong in its unity, steadfast in defending its sovereignty, and steadily advancing towards the future.

Don't forget to enjoy the ride 🚀

New term unlocked: full stack builder. Taking a product manger, front end engineer, back-end engineer, designer and rolling them into one.

VC vs. founder

It's a mistake for startups to treat fundraises as a series of milestones. There's something even more impressive than raising a series whatever: to be making so much that you don't need to. Eventually all companies have to reach this point. The sooner you do, the better.

Hire out of pain. Don't hire because you think you'll need someone soon or maybe sometime later. Wait until you or your team are actually hurting: working weekends, missing family dinners, dropping balls. That pain is the signal that the role is real. I learned this the hard way after watching founders (including myself) hire ahead of need and end up with people in roles that weren't fully formed yet. When you hire out of pain, you know exactly what the job is because you've been doing it yourself. You can evaluate performance because you know what good looks like. And the new hire knows you'll step back in if they fail, because you were just doing it last week.

@KayraYasa @valaratomics @JosephLillard_ You’re one of a kind (now two). What a wonderful story! Congratulations ❤️ 🥳

DM a guy on X, move to El Segundo together within days, get engaged exactly a year later at the @valaratomics Erebor NYE party with a Hastelloy ring the boys made that day 🥳 I love you @JosephLillard_

@TalalAlKaissi @core42_ai Huge congratulations Talal! Well deserved and excited to see how @core42_ai grows with you at the helm.

As I step into the role of Interim CEO of @core42_ai and before looking ahead, it matters to recognize what was built. Over the last two years, Kiril Evtimov led Core42 through its formative phase. He helped turn an idea into a real sovereign neocloud, delivered operating scale, and earned trust in some of the most demanding environments. That foundation is strong. Thank you, Kiril, for the mentorship, leadership, and standards you set. And for being an incredible friend and inspiration to me personally. Now the horizon expands. At @G42ai, we see AI as the next great infrastructure layer. Just as electricity and the internet reshaped societies, intelligence is becoming something that must be produced, distributed, and governed at scale. This is the Intelligence Grid we have described for a while at G42. And Core42 is the digital infrastructure backbone that makes it real. We are already deploying it. From national sovereign clouds to large-scale AI systems, from the UAE to Europe, and the US. Our platforms power mission-critical workloads, train and infer on some of the world’s most advanced systems, and underpin real services for governments, researchers, and enterprises. Three of our supercomputing platforms are ranked on the TOP500. Our cloud and AI infrastructure is benchmarked alongside the leading global players. This is not theory. It is live infrastructure. The next phase is about acceleration. AI-native societies will not emerge by accident. They require trusted infrastructure, energy-aware compute, sovereign controls, and orchestration that works across chips, clouds, and borders. The neocloud model is evolving fast. Workloads are shifting toward inference. Silicon diversity is exploding. Customers want outcomes, not just capacity. Our ambition is to build the world’s leading full-stack sovereign neocloud. Tier-one in scale. Global in reach. Integrated across infrastructure, orchestration, and last-mile services. Enabled by the full G42 ecosystem and designed to serve nations, not just markets. Very few platforms get the chance to help shape how intelligence is deployed across the world. Fewer still get to do it at this scale, with this level of trust. Proud to take this on with an exceptional team, deep partners, and the full momentum of G42 behind us. The Intelligence Grid is being built. Core42 is here to power it.

How to Keep Winning amasad.me/keep-winning

the threshold for unicorn should change to $1B in revenue. unicorns aren’t supposed to be this common…

Gamma crossed $50M ARR with 28 employees and more cash in the bank than we had raised ($23M) In hindsight: We got here because we ignored common VC advice. Examples of glaringly bad advice that you should ignore to save you $10M+ and years of time, like we did for Gamma:

Nothing stands in their way. Not bullets, not missiles, not drones!

@IbrahimAjami Welcome back Ibrahim! You’ve been missed. Excited for what’s ahead for you and building Abu Dhabi into a leading global tech hub!

Personal news: I’ve returned to Abu Dhabi, my home since 1980. My mission, started in 2007, continues—to find and serve the architects of technology that breathe new life into our world. Abu Dhabi, now a global AI & tech hub, is where I’ll drive this forward. After 7 incredible years in London, building our presence & lifelong connections, I thank the world’s most cosmopolitan city and its amazing people. Join me in Abu Dhabi 🇦🇪

Saudi Arabia to become the first nation of AI coders powered by @Replit. We’re proud to partner with HUMAIN, Saudi’s new full AI value chain company owned by the Public Investment Fund, to launch an Arabic-first version of Replit to empower the next generation of builders.

Big congrats to @Jacob on launching VC Mastermind — a much-needed space for VC GPs to get real insight on building great firms. vcmastermind.com