Why Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson Are Wrong—At Least When It Comes to Building Companies

Friedrich Nietzsche was wrong. So was Kelly Clarkson. At least when it comes to startups.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a powerful line. But as an operating principle for entrepreneurs, it’s dangerously misleading.

Hardship does not automatically make a company stronger. Sometimes it only exposes what was already weak: unclear decision-making, poor cash visibility, fragile communication, overextended growth, or a founder who has mistaken momentum for durability.

The startups that come out of a crisis stronger are not the ones that endured more pain. They are the ones that had already built the structures to make better decisions under pressure.

That distinction matters now. Across the MENA region, founders are building through severe geopolitical uncertainty, a more selective funding environment, sharper investor scrutiny, supply chain disruption, and accelerating technological change. The easy-money era has ended.

But this is not a bad time to build in the UAE and the wider region. In many ways, it may be one of the best.

The fundamentals remain compelling: high digital adoption, large structural gaps, rising demand from consumers and corporates for technology-led solutions, and markets that are still early in their next phase of transformation. Investor sentiment supports that view. A recent survey of active investors across the US, UK, Germany, France, and China found that 82 per cent were confident in the Gulf’s economic outlook, 69 per cent rated the region a good or great place to invest now, and 70 per cent expected the GCC’s global economic weight to keep growing over the next five years.

In the UAE specifically, founders can build from a base that combines capital, infrastructure, supportive regulation, global talent, and strong connectivity to high-growth markets. So, the message to entrepreneurs is not “wait until things calm down.” The message is: build now—but build properly.

At a recent discussion I moderated on the question “Is your startup crisis-proof?”, held in alignment with the Entrepreneurs Resilience Fund initiative launched by the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Center (Sheraa), one of the UAE’s leading early-stage startup ecosystems, one point came through clearly. Capital no longer follows growth alone. It follows companies that can hold together when conditions turn.

I learned this lesson the hard way. At one of my startups, we once grew more than 300 per cent in a year. On paper, that looked like success. Inside the business, the momentum was intoxicating. The growth story was working, and when a growth story is working, it becomes difficult to challenge. Warning signs around the coming economic crisis were visible, but not acted on quickly enough. Correcting course felt like contradicting the success story.

That is one of the most dangerous moments in a startup: when growth becomes a reason not to ask harder questions. A company can be adding users, hiring quickly, expanding into new markets, and still becoming more fragile. Rapid growth can hide weak unit economics, shallow leadership depth, unclear accountability, poor reporting, or overdependence on a single founder, supplier, customer, or funding round.

This is where governance matters. Too often, it is treated as paperwork, rather than infrastructure. To a founder moving at speed, it can sound like bureaucracy arriving too early. That is exactly the wrong way to think about it. Governance determines decision quality when the environment changes. A company with clear decision rights, accurate reporting, runway visibility, and an engaged board can respond in days; a company without them spends the first weeks of a crisis working out who is in charge.

A crisis rarely creates the weakness. It exposes the gap that was already there. Every startup should know how long its cash lasts and which levers can extend it, when Plan B activates, who makes the call, and who communicates the change. Most Plan Bs describe what might happen, but not who decides, when they activate, or how long they run. In a crisis, ambiguity is expensive.

That is why investors now prioritize founders with credible numbers, strong boards and the discipline to treat governance as protection rather than friction. They are not avoiding risk; venture capital is built on risk. They are looking for founders who understand the difference between ambition and recklessness.

For the region, this is a necessary maturation point. The race for capital is no longer only between startups. It is between ecosystems. Founders, investors, regulators, corporates and talent are all part of the same equation. The MENA’s startup ecosystem is no longer trying to prove that it exists. It is trying to prove that it can scale with institutional confidence.

The numbers show both pressure and opportunity. According to MAGNiTT’s H1 2026 review, MENA deal count fell 41 per cent in the first half of the year, while funding fell by only 22 per cent. That fall shows the impact of the current crisis—but the signal is not that capital has disappeared. The gap tells that capital is concentrating around fewer companies, clearer business models and ecosystems that offer credible paths to scale.

That concentration puts an imperative on patient, disciplined founders—and it makes ecosystem-level support more critical than ever. Sheraa launched its AED 5 million Entrepreneur Resilience Fund early in the current crisis, drew more than 300 applications in six weeks, and worked with companies to support. Just as telling were the founders who did not need support but offered time, insight, and access to those who did. No founder survives alone. Company resilience is built through structure and decision discipline. Ecosystem resilience is built through trust between founders, investors, accelerators, regulators, corporates, and customers.

At CE-Creates, the in-house venture-building platform of the UAE-based Crescent Enterprises, we see this every day. Our model is based on building and backing companies from the UAE that solve real structural problems and can compete regionally and globally. That means validated market needs, operator-led founder-CEOs, patient capital, commercial discipline, and strategic partnerships from the beginning.

This region has no shortage of ideas. The next test is whether those ideas can become companies that endure. I am optimistic: every cycle creates pain, but it also creates openings. Customer behavior shifts, inefficiencies become visible, governments accelerate reforms, talent moves, capital becomes more thoughtful, and stronger companies earn room to grow.

For entrepreneurs, the time to build in this region is right now. But the lesson is not to celebrate hardship. Hardship is not a strategy, and survival is not a business model. What makes a startup stronger is what it builds before the crisis arrives: governance, trust, communication, focus, financial discipline, and a network of people willing to tell the truth early enough for it to matter.

Growth is exciting, but governance is what makes it last. In the next phase of this region’s startup story, that may be the most investable quality of all.