#395: 45 Years, 7 Tech Waves & a $1.5 Billion IPO at 71 | Fayez Ibbini on Building Alpha Data, AI & Why Retirement is a Lie

He arrived in Abu Dhabi in 1981 when roads turned to soft sand and ceilings collapsed because villas were built with saltwater cement. He  came for  six months. He never left. Forty-five years later, he just took his company public at a  $1.5 billion   valuation  and  he's  71 years old with zero plans to stop.  

In this episode, Spencer sits down with Fayez   Ibbini , founder of Alpha Data, one of the UAE's most enduring technology companies. From coding assembly language for the Kuwait Stock Exchange on 16-hour days, to pivoting from IBM mini-computers to PCs, to riding every wave from networking and the internet to cloud, mobile, big data, IoT and now AI .  Fayez has been at the frontier of technology in this region for  nearly half  a century.  

But this  isn't  just a business story.  It's  a story about passion over comfort, about the cost of obsession, about what it really means to build something that outlasts you.  He'll  tell you that if you  haven't  started a business by 40,  don't  bother. That retirement was invented to push you out. That AI is not another wave  -   it's  a tsunami.  And that  the most expensive lessons in business are  almost always  about people.  

Whether  you're  an entrepreneur at the start of your journey, a leader navigating the AI revolution, or someone who wonders what it looks like to still be curious and hungry at 71 . T his conversation will challenge everything you think you know about success, technology, and time.

 

Timestamps:  

00:00 – "A golden cage": why Fayez came for six m