Randi Zuckerberg, the former marketing director at Facebook and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, commended the UAE on Wednesday for establishing a unified ecosystem where entrepreneurs, startups, and businesses can easily access regulators and financiers.

"One of the most thrilling aspects of being an entrepreneur here is the ability to have everything at your fingertips—fashion, media, culture, finance—all in one place. In the United States, we were very compartmentalized in Silicon Valley. In the US, you have a tech city here, and then you have to travel six hours to reach the policy-making hub, and another flight to get to the finance or media center. To be able to create and build in an area where all these industries are adjacent and can share knowledge is truly a blessing. This positions this region for tremendous success," said Zuckerberg, who is the sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Abu Dhabi and Dubai have become significant hubs for supporting startups and entrepreneurs in various technology fields. The UAE is home to some of the world's largest unicorns, thanks to the regulatory and financial support provided to these startups to scale their operations.

"It's incredibly exciting to see what's happening here for entrepreneurs, to be able to build in an environment that may not have the same regulatory legacy as other countries, and to build it from scratch," she said during her keynote address on the first day of the inaugural Abu Dhabi Business Week summit.

Randi Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of ensuring that all entrepreneurs have access to resources, such as those available in the UAE and the region, to build a vibrant technology hub.

Randi Zuckerberg was one of the first few people to join Facebook at the request of her brother Mark in a small room with just 10 people. "I think a lot of what we see in innovation is perceived as an overnight success. There's so much pressure on entrepreneurs today to return investment quickly, but it's crucial to remember that anything truly worth building, with the scale of reaching billions of people, takes years of foresight, creativity, and iteration. There's no such thing as an overnight success," she said.

Randi shared her experience at Facebook, where she held about 20 jobs initially, being one of the only non-engineers. "I had about 10 different business cards with various titles, depending on who I was meeting with that day. My entire marketing budget for the first year Facebook existed was one box of T-shirts," she recalled.

Randi also mentioned Facebook's early hackathons, where employees were free to work on anything they wanted outside their day jobs. "As we held more of these events, we noticed that many brilliant ideas came from unexpected sources—junior employees, people from different industries, or those returning from parental leave. We unintentionally created an environment where every person felt like their own entrepreneur," she said.

During her 10 years at Facebook, she noted that nearly every idea that became a top product or revenue generator originated from these hackathons. She encouraged people to dream and take risks.

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