Samer Sarraf - Investing in the GCC: Private Equity Discipline in Public Markets
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Welcome to a new edition of the Valley Investing with Legends podcast. My name is Tano Santos and I'm the Robert Hellbron Professor of Asset Management and Finance at Columbia Business School and the faculty director at the Hellbron Center. Michael Mabusan is missing in action today, but as usual, he will be back for future episodes. So this is our first podcast of 2026 and the Hellbron year is in full swing. I'm in the middle of my Val Investing teaching.
We just had a very successful CEMA conference and it was fun to see many of you there. And in January I went with the students to the United Arab Emirates to Dubai and Abu Dhabi to visit with the asset management community there, the sovereign wealth funds, investment banks, and so on. And it was wonderful to get to know that very dynamic region better. It was a fascinating trip. The students were their usual grade and I wanted to bring to the podcast some of the things that we learned during that trip.
And I cannot think of anyone better than my guest today to do so. Now, before I introduce him, just to reiterate something that I've said many times before in this podcast, that one of the best things about my job is the opportunity to meet amazing investors, some very famous, others a little bit less so, though they all deserve to be better known. And one of the things that I learned over the years is that terrific investors are to be found everywhere, across asset classes, markets and geographies. And getting to know these investors gets even better when those investors happen to be Columbia Business School's alums.
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