TURN8

Women's sport in Saudi Arabia is the best CVC case study I’ve seen in 15 years. Last month, I advised a GCC sports federation on their corporate venture strategy. The conversation wasn't about athletes, it was about infrastructure financing and public-private partnerships. Women's sport in Saudi Arabia has grown 150%+ since Vision 2030. Over 300,000 registered female athletes. Thousands are competing in organized school leagues. But the growth isn't the story. The structure is. Women's sport was positioned as reform infrastructure, not a side program. Which means: + Early mandate from the top + Clear ownership (not committee dilution) + Protection through leadership cycles This is the same playbook that makes corporate ventures succeed. When innovation sits inside a "reform" or "transformation" narrative, not a "nice to have" bucket, it gets budget, authority, and survival beyond one executive's tenure. The question I'm asking clients now: Is your CVC positioned as infrastructure, or as an experiment? Because that distinction determines whether it scales or gets cut in the next re-org. Ministry of Sport – وزارة الرياضة Sela Company SURJ Sports Investment Savvy Games Group Qatar Sports Investments Qatar Investment Authority #CorporateVentureCapital #VisionTransformation #GCCInnovation #SportsInfrastructure #VentureBuilding #GCC #Sports #Vision2030 #SaudiArabia 

There’s a pattern I’ve noticed around AI pilots that actually move forward. Very early on, companies are clear about 3 things: 1. Who will own the outcome once the pilot team steps away. 2. Where the insight is expected to show up in day-to-day decisions. 3. And what is allowed to change once the system starts producing signals. Because of that clarity, the pilot naturally finds its place inside the organisation. What stands out to me is that the AI teams spend less time perfecting the experiment and more time preparing themselves for adoption. Over time, the conversation turns simple on how the organisation wants to work with the AI. That shift is usually what makes the difference. #AI #Technology #CVC #SaudiArabia #GCC #VentureCapital

I’ve watched emerging tech initiatives stall in the GCC for one familiar reason. Everyone wants speed, but very few want to own the risk. So either everything goes through committees, and nothing moves. Or teams are told to move fast, and leadership steps in only when something breaks. But what I’ve seen work: 1) Some boards stop approving projects one by one. They approve boundaries instead. 2) Capital pools are agreed upfront. Clear rules on data use, sector focus, and escalation are set. If teams stay within those lines, they move quickly. 3) Others stop releasing money by quarter and start releasing it by proof. Small bets get funded first. More capital follows only after adoption or regulatory clearance shows up. A third pattern is running two approval tracks at the same time. Small experiments move fast. Full governance kicks in only when real risk appears. In the Gulf, teams that involve regulators move much faster than those waiting for perfect rules. What still trips organisations up is the same question. Where does ownership actually sit when something goes wrong - with the committee that slowed things down, or with the leader who pushed teams to move fast? I see most organisations oscillating between the two. Where in your organisation does governance actually help teams move and where does it quietly slow things down? #SaudiArabia #Leadership #Governance #Technology #Vision2030 #VentureCapital 

I’ve been part of recent GenAI discussions in the GCC. Product choice isn’t where decisions slow down. What I keep hearing are harder questions about data, compute, and long-term control. That’s when it starts making sense. In Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, GenAI is increasingly treated less like software and more like infrastructure. Once AI starts shaping public services, healthcare, regulation, or economic planning, outsourcing the core capability feels risky. You can buy tools easily. Owning the capability is harder, but it’s safer. That’s why I see the focus shifting to 3 things commercial GenAI products can’t really solve on their own: Data - Arabic data that reflects local language, culture, and business reality is a strategic asset. Compute - If critical workloads run on infrastructure you don’t control, continuity becomes fragile. Control - If you don’t own the full stack, you don’t decide how AI is trained, deployed, or governed. Seen through a normal tech or VC lens, some of these AI infrastructure investments being made here look hard to justify. They only start to make sense when you see GenAI the same way you see power, ports, or telecom. The takeaway for me is simple. If GenAI is becoming core to how decisions are made, it can’t sit only in IT or innovation teams. Someone has to own it end-to-end, with clear accountability and long-term funding logic. To leaders and investors, my question is - If AI becomes critical to your system, who owns it, and are they accountable for how it performs over time? #SaudiArabia #GenAI #Vision2030 #VentureCapital #GCC

Most healthcare bets in the Gulf look obvious on paper. They’re also where returns are getting harder to compound. What’s interesting is not whether hospitals still matter. They do. Saudi Arabia alone is adding 8,500+ beds by 2029. Acute and complex care remains hospital-led. But more demand is being routed into primary clinics, home care, diagnostics, telemedicine, and pharmacies. As I’ve been watching hospital systems evolve, I see an advantage sits with whoever decides where care should happen. What stays inside the hospital. What moves outside. Who is responsible when care moves across settings. How AI is shifting decision-making, triage, and coordination across settings. When this is clear, patient flow improves, costs start to make sense, and hospitals get used for what they’re actually good at. The challenge is that most GCC hospital systems can’t change incentives, budgets, or accountability structures overnight. So what’s working in practice is building coordination layers on top of these existing hospitals, focused on specific populations and outcomes. This is where insurers, platforms, and risk-bearing operators see demand earlier and sit across the full care journey. This is also where we work at TURN8, building these coordination layers as real ventures. Starting small, tying them to outcomes, and scaling only when the economics are proven. Not big promises. Just systems that can run. So hospitals still deliver depth. Infrastructure still enables scale. The leverage shows up in shaping the flow between them. That’s where capital starts to compound earlier. Coordination sees demand, cost, and outcomes before anyone else. Question for operators and investors: In your healthcare experience, who decides where care happens, and are they accountable for the outcome? Sources: GCC healthcare expenditure outlook, Saudi Vision 2030 health data, UAE digital health disclosures, Regional home healthcare and telemedicine estimates #SaudiArabia #Vision2030 #VentureCapital #Healthcare #Innovation #Technology #KSA #TURN8 #UAE #MiddleEast

FIFA 2034. Qiddiya. NEOM. Seen together, they explain what Saudi Arabia is really building. Most people look at this and see sports. I see a coordination problem being solved in the open. In sports, if people, venues, mobility, energy, security, and data don’t work together in real time, the event fails. That’s why sports work as a forcing function. - With FIFA 2034, Saudi is coordinating more than 15 stadiums across five cities. - Qiddiya is designed to operate year-round, not occasionally. - NEOM’s stadium is being built into - The Line, assuming energy, mobility, and data are native from day one. - Across all of this, smart-city systems - AI traffic control, digital twins, advanced security, and dense sensor networks are being deployed together. - Microsoft is already building sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure to support systems operating at this scale. What’s different here is sequencing. Coordination isn’t figured out later. It’s designed upfront. Sports compresses reality. Everything collides in real time. Systems either hold or they don’t. That’s why environments like this matter. They reveal how people, infrastructure, and decisions behave under pressure, at scale. That’s the layer we pay attention to at TURN8. Not because it’s sports, but because this is where coordination becomes real and venture outcomes stop being theoretical. This isn’t really a sports story. It’s about how serious societies are learning to design themselves. Where else do we see systems being designed this deliberately, before scale forces alignment? Sources: FIFA World Cup 2034 bid documents, Saudi Ministry of Sport, NEOM project disclosures, Qiddiya master plan, Microsoft Saudi cloud announcements. #SaudiArabia #Vision2030 #VentureCapital #TechInvesting #SportsTech #Innovation #Technology #NEOM #Qiddiya #FIFA2034 #KSA #TURN8

I was in a healthcare discussion recently about hospital capacity. What worried me wasn’t what we talked about. It was what nobody mentioned. Saudi Arabia's biggest healthcare move this year didn’t happen in a hospital. It’s happening through the Quality of Life Program, which is driving higher sports participation under Vision 2030. Most people still see this as a participation goal. I see it differently. At that scale, you're building one of the largest health monitoring systems in the world. And that matters because 70% of Saudi Arabia’s disease burden comes from chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease. Most are preventable if caught early. The problem is that we usually catch them too late. Sports systems observe people years earlier, when outcomes are still reversible. Active participation generates continuous signals - cardiovascular fitness, metabolic stress, and joint health. Wearables, sports clinics, and facilities already capture this. Today, it’s optimized for individual performance, not system-level prevention. Qatar proved this works at a smaller scale. Over 15 years, Aspetar analyzed roughly 18,000 athlete records and developed models to identify injury risk and predisposing factors early. Saudi Arabia can scale this nationally. With sports participation reaching a meaningful scale, the system could start flagging injury patterns before surgery is needed, metabolic risk 3–5 years before a diabetes diagnosis, and early cardiovascular warning signs. Public health data shows that early intervention in chronic conditions can reduce repeat hospital visits by roughly 20–30% and meaningfully lower long-term treatment costs. This is where Saudi Arabia's $64B healthcare investment creates leverage by shifting the system upstream. The data exists. The infrastructure exists. The question is strategic: Do we measure sports as participation, or do we design it as prevention? (Sources: Wikipedia, Vision 2030 QoL Program, WHO, CDC Saudi Arabia data, Aspetar research.) #Healthcare #SportsTech #venturecapital #innovation #technology #KSA #SaudiArabia #Vision2030

I had to unlearn one founder instinct when I started working with corporate venture teams. For a long time, I believed speed fixes everything. As a founder, moving fast is often the right answer. You learn by doing, adjust in motion, and if you slow down too much, you lose momentum. That logic does not translate well inside corporates. When corporate venture teams move fast without governance, it doesn’t create confidence. Decisions feel abrupt, and ownership becomes unclear. Senior leaders worry about accountability before they think about upside. I learned that the resistance was about how decisions were being made. The mindset I had to build was “make decisions legible.” Legible to leadership, governance, and the people who will be asked to defend the decision later. In practice, this meant: Clear decision owners so accountability isn’t vague Clear milestones so everyone knows what progress means Clear proof points so leaders can back decisions with confidence Corporate ventures fail because speed outpaces trust. Once decisions become understandable, organizations are willing to back them. And that’s when venture building actually starts working. Where have you seen speed help a venture and where has it quietly created resistance? #leadership #corporateventure #venturecapital #innovation #technology #KSA #SaudiArabia #Vision2030