SADEQ ALKHOORI (ABU DHABI)
The first lesson in entrepreneurship is not always profit. For 25-year-old Emirati entrepreneur Zayed Albreiki, it came through customers, orders, events, and the pressure of running businesses at a young age.
His experience with a coffee business and a children’s spa gave him a practical understanding of what an enterprise requires before it becomes a story of growth.
“Starting my coffee business at a young age helped me gain practical experience in dealing with customers, managing orders, and understanding how a business works in real life,” he told Aletihad.
The lesson, he said, mattered more than income.
“Young people should focus on gaining experience rather than just making money,” Albreiki said. “Through my coffee business, I learned customer service, time management, and problem-solving, which are essential skills for any future career.”
His children’s spa business added another layer, particularly around confidence, responsibility, and adaptability. “It gave me real hands-on experience and helped me build confidence while growing my salon,” he said.
Building the Habit Before the Company
Across Abu Dhabi and the wider UAE, youth experiences are feeding into a bigger conversation about early exposure to enterprise. It sparks discussions about how young people can learn to identify needs, test ideas, manage uncertainty, and build useful solutions.
In this domain, the UAE’s capabilities are widely recognised. The country ranked first globally for entrepreneurship for the fifth consecutive year in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2025/2026 report.
Highlighting the UAE’s focus on preparing the next generation of entrepreneurs, the report placed the country among the top five for entrepreneurship education in schools. It cited its clear focus on developing creative thinking, problem-solving, risk assessment and opportunity recogniton among students.
Khalifa Fund said introducing entrepreneurship awareness earlier among the youth is part of a wider ecosystem that supports them from early mindset formation to scaling established ventures.
Through initiatives such as the Khalifa Fund Entrepreneurship Competition, Young Entrepreneur Programme, and Young Emirati Traders Award, the fund said it aims to guide young people’s interest through structured learning and practical experience.
“We see it as a natural extension of a wider ecosystem that supports entrepreneurs at every stage, from early mindset formation to scaling established ventures,” Khalifa Fund said in a statement to Aletihad.
“Youth entrepreneurship is a cornerstone of building a stronger, more resilient enterprise culture in Abu Dhabi and the wider UAE,” it added. “At its core, it is about shaping mindsets early by encouraging young people to view ideas as potential scalable ventures.”
Khalifa Fund said early exposure helps develop critical thinking, creativity, financial awareness, resilience, independence, and a practical understanding of how ideas can become real-world solutions.
Thinking like a Builder
Ashwin Joshi, Director at startAD, said the distinction is between entrepreneurship as a career path and entrepreneurial thinking as a capability. “Entrepreneurship is a vocation, while being entrepreneurial is a mindset,” he said.
Joshi said a structured approach to entrepreneurship can help young people build the mental models needed to deal with risk, constraints and uncertainty.
“At a young age, entrepreneurship teaches students how to identify problems, test ideas, work with constraints, ask better questions, and recover from rejection,” he said. “Those are not ‘startup skills’ alone. They are life and leadership skills.”
At NYU Abu Dhabi, he said, students in startAD’s Entrepreneurship Incubator Programme spend 10 weeks moving from early ideas to working prototypes while engaging with mentors, investors, and real-world constraints.
“They begin to ask better questions, take ownership, and move from ‘assignment mode’ to ‘builder mode’,” Joshi said.
That shift is becoming more relevant as young people enter a labour market being reshaped by artificial intelligence, climate priorities, and changing economic structures.
“The most valuable capability is not knowing the answer,” he said. “It is knowing how to figure it out.”
For Joshi, Abu Dhabi and the UAE have already built many of the foundations of a future economy, including capital, infrastructure, research institutions, AI ambition, advanced industries, sustainability priorities and a globally connected business environment.
“The next challenge is conversion: turning these inputs into companies, jobs, and real economic outcomes,” he said. “That is where youth entrepreneurship becomes critical.”
Learning the Rules Earlier
Abdulaziz Bin Redha, Founder and CEO of HyveGeo, said entrepreneurship should be introduced as a set of transferable skills, not only as a route to company creation. “The key is to frame entrepreneurship not only as ‘starting a business’, but as a set of life skills,” he said.
Those skills, he said, include resilience, problem-solving, creativity, communication, leadership, teamwork, conflict resolution and the ability to identify a problem faced by many people and build a solution around it.
“These are transferable skills,” Bin Redha said. “They benefit future entrepreneurs, but also future government leaders, private-sector professionals, scientists, engineers, policymakers, and community builders.”
He said entrepreneurship also teaches young people that ideas alone are not enough. They need to understand people’s needs, communicate clearly, manage resources, and learn from failure.
“For teenagers especially, entrepreneurship gives them agency,” he said. “It shows them that they do not have to wait for permission to begin solving problems.”
Bin Redha said his own early business experience showed him the value of learning those lessons sooner. He started his first business at around 20. Looking back, he said one early mistake was building the company almost like a small version of a large corporation before it had properly sold anything.
Later, he learned about lean startups, prototyping, iteration, smaller focused teams, fundraising and testing before scaling. “Earlier exposure would not have removed all the mistakes, because mistakes are part of entrepreneurship, but it would have helped me understand the rules of the game much earlier,” he said.
AI Raises the Value of Imagination
Muamar Magam, Founder and Managing Partner of Quintus Labs Technical Consultancy, said AI is making entrepreneurial thinking more important for younger generations as the cost of building products and services falls.
“In an era where AI lowers the barriers to building, the true currency of the future is no longer just intelligence. It is imagination, purpose, and the courage to act,” he said.
Magam said early entrepreneurship exposure gives young people a stronger sense of agency and helps them treat uncertainty as something to work through rather than avoid.
“When we stop teaching our children to wait for opportunities and start teaching them to build solutions, we don’t just create entrepreneurs. We forge a generation of leaders,” he said.
What Early Business Teaches First
For young entrepreneurs, many of those lessons begin through ordinary pressure. Albreiki said communication and adaptability were among the most important skills he developed through his businesses.
“In my coffee business, I deal with different customers and situations, so being able to communicate clearly and adjust quickly is very important,” he said.
The children’s spa business, he said, also taught him how to manage different clients, events and unexpected problems. “Being able to handle different clients, manage events, and solve problems quickly helped me improve and grow my business,” Albreiki said.
For Bin Redha, the purpose of introducing entrepreneurship earlier is not to push every young person toward the same future. “The goal is not to turn every child into a CEO,” he said. “The goal is to raise a generation that sees problems clearly, takes initiative, understands value, and believes the impossible can become possible with the right skills, discipline and support.”