In 1999 a ruler decided to build a city for the internet in the desert, and I was on the team that drew it.
Dubai Internet City was founded in October 1999 and opened in October 2000: a $200m tax-free zone built by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to pull the world's tech companies to the Gulf. It signed roughly 200 companies before it opened. That July, Space Shuttle Columbia deployed the Chandra X-ray Observatory, with Eileen Collins becoming the first woman to command a shuttle mission.
In 1999 I was advising the Government of Dubai on internet and technology, and the assignment turned into something I still can hardly believe I got to do. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum wanted to build a home for the new economy in the desert, a free zone where a software company could own itself outright and pay no tax for fifty years. I was part of the founding team that took Dubai Internet City from an idea to a place.
It opened in October 2000 with around two hundred companies already signed. Microsoft, IBM, Siemens, Oracle. Names that in 1999 had no obvious reason to plant a flag in the Gulf, until someone gave them one.
What I learned there is a thing I keep returning to. Infrastructure is a form of persuasion. You do not convince the future to show up with a speech. You pour the foundation, lay the fibre, write the law, and then the future arrives because you made it cheaper to arrive than to stay away.
Four years earlier I had been selling domain names in India, betting on addresses before the roads existed. In Dubai I got to help build the roads.
FILL: one specific moment from those rooms, the detail only you remember.