About
Riyadh
I'm Mohtab Arabiat. I lead external communications at Diriyah Company. Before that, I led social media at Expo 2020 Dubai and Expo City Dubai, working on platforms with enormous audiences and very little room for error.
Earlier, I worked agency side at Starcom and FP7 McCann across telecom, consumer brands, restaurants and banking. I also spent several years building professional education programmes at AstroLabs and New Media Academy, helping practitioners turn experience into something other people could learn from.
This site is where the thinking that does not fit into a deck goes. I write mostly to think clearly. Sometimes the result is useful to someone else.
Timeline
The larger entries are the moments that changed how I think. Smaller markers keep the chronology honest.
Four strands run together: work, academia, angel investing and family. They only accumulate. A chapter can end without disappearing.
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Family
Born
Born in Abu Dhabi, the first place I knew as home.
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Academia
Al Nahda International Schools
Eleven years in the same school. Al Nahda was where I grew up and where I built friendships that have lasted for life. Looking back, it gave me a sense of roots that became more valuable every time the map changed.
Lebanon
Lebanon
Academia
National Evangelical School
At seventeen I moved from Abu Dhabi to Lebanon for my final year of school. It was the first time I had lived outside the UAE, and it widened the world I knew before university began.
Beirut, Lebanon
Academia
Computer science, C&E American University
Beirut, Lebanon
Work
Virgin Megastore Lebanon
I worked at Virgin Megastore while finishing university, in the books section. I was surrounded by books and people who cared about them, and that was more formative than the job title suggests.
The reading has not stopped since.
Built into later work in education at AstroLabs and New Media Academy.
Dubai, UAE
Dubai, UAE
Places
Moved to Dubai
Virgin offered me a management role in Dubai and I took it. It was the next step from the years in Lebanon, and the first time work determined where I would live.
Dubai, UAE
Work
Department Manager, Virgin Megastore
One of the happiest and most formative jobs I have had, and the one that reads smallest on a CV. I have never since managed a team where the work was that visible. You could see the whole floor, and by six o'clock you knew whether the day had gone well.
Dubai, UAE
Work
Sales Consultant, Aptec Distribution
Dubai, UAE
Work
Aleph Consulting
Marketing, business development, real estate, flooring, advertising. We did whatever the client in front of us needed through a financial crisis that was removing clients faster than we could add them. It was not glamorous, but I learned more about how businesses stay alive in those two years than in almost any two since.
Dubai, UAE
Work
The first Tweetup
A room of people who had found each other on a platform nobody's employer took seriously yet. I went to one and then went to all of them.
Everything after this runs back through that room.
Built into Tea For You, Starcom and AstroLabs.
Dubai, UAE
Work
Business Development Manager, Mindware
Enterprise technology on the Symantec side. It was a good role and gave me a solid grounding in sales, partnerships and enterprise technology just before social media became the centre of my career.
The agencies
TECOM, Dubai, UAE
Work
Tea For You
A boy offered me a glass of tea on the walk home through TECOM. The shop belonged to a Russian family, and it became where I went after work. I kept bringing the Tweetup crowd with me, and eventually the owner asked whether I would handle their social media. They became my first client. The day the first payment cleared I resigned from Mindware. That evening I went to a Tweetup, ran into an old friend, and he introduced me to someone from Starcom.
More came out of this than out of anything else here.
Built into Starcom, FP7 McCann and AstroLabs.
Dubai, UAE
Work
Manager, Social Media, Starcom
Seven interviews. In the last one I was asked why I deserved a manager's title in an industry I had been working in for a matter of months. I said I already had clients. Asked who, I said Tea For You. The GM said: I know them, they're all over social media. I said: then you have already seen my work. du, Emirates NBD, Cadbury, Flake, Oreo. I helped launch Emirates NBD on social media at a point when banks were still deciding whether the channel was a legal risk or a marketing one. I also worked on early social customer service, which turned out to be the part that mattered. I was on the Oreo team while the whole industry was turning toward reacting in real time.
Built into FP7 McCann.
Dubai, UAE
Work
Momentum / FP7 McCann
I joined as Senior Account Manager, Digital in 2013 and became Social Media Director in 2015. Over six years, I built the social function, won new business and helped formalise the discipline across the McCann network. That meant writing down what we had been improvising and seeing which parts survived contact with a process. We flew a UAE flag to the edge of space. We hung a fifty foot Puma jersey. We built a Fanta vending machine that asked something of you before it gave you anything.
The long years are not always the loud ones.
Dubai, UAE
Angel investing
First angel cheque
Small, and into something I understood well enough to be wrong about carefully. This runs alongside everything else from here on and has never been the main line.
Built into later investments, the El Grocer exit and OQAL Angel Investors.
Athens, Greece
Family
Married
We got married. From here on, the timeline stopped being mine alone.
Angel investing
Eureeca
Angel investing
Enerwhere
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Family
Adam
Our first child. Home became the centre of the map in a way it had never been before.
Angel investing
Propnology
Teaching
Dubai, UAE
Academia
Head of Digital Development, AstroLabs
Four cohorts a year became 28, across the GCC, in English and Arabic. The number is the least interesting part. What it actually took was finding practitioners who could teach and teachers who had done the work, and there are far fewer of both than anyone admits.
Four cohorts to 28.
Dubai, UAE
Academia
Director of Education, New Media Academy
One of the first five employees, helping shape the academy from its earliest days. I led the Robert McKee storytelling programme against a goal of training a thousand Arab storytellers. Big numbers are useful when they force a team to build systems capable of reaching them.
Expo 2020 Dubai
Dubai, UAE
Work
Head of Social Media, Expo 2020 Dubai
I joined a month after the gates opened. It became one of the busiest social operations in the world. I spent most of it running large multidisciplinary teams rather than doing the work myself, which was a different kind of work and a different kind of responsibility.
Angel investing
First exit, El Grocer
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Family
Sanad
Our second child. Home got louder, busier and better.
Dubai, UAE
Work
Expo City Dubai
The narrative had to move from the place where the world met to a city people would choose to live and work in. Those are not the same story. The first had an end date. The second had residents, businesses and a future. COP28 sat inside it.
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Places
Moved to Riyadh
After nearly eighteen years in the UAE, I moved to Riyadh. By then I understood that a move does not erase what came before. You carry the people, habits and lessons with you, and the next place adds to them.
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Angel investing
OQAL Angel Investors
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Work
Diriyah Company
The shift is from campaigns to systems: leadership, operations, governance and commercial transformation. Working on one of the world's largest destination developments means much of the job is deciding how decisions get made. The systems are less photogenic than the campaigns, but they are what make the campaigns possible.
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Family
Zaid
Our third child. Five of us now, building this part together.
Angel investing
Sav
Work
Still building
Still learning. Still curious. Still building on everything that came before. The years after this one are empty because they have not happened yet.
The record runs past today into years with nothing in them yet. A trajectory that stops at the present looks finished.