Samer Sarraf - Investing in the GCC: Private Equity Discipline in Public Markets

**Tano Santos** (0:01)
Welcome to a new edition of the Value Investing with Legends podcast. My name is Tano Santos, and I'm the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management and Finance at Columbia Business School, and the Faculty Director at the Heilbrunn Center. Michael Marbosan 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 Heilbrunn year is in full swing. I'm in the middle of my Value Investing teaching, we just had a very successful CIMA conference, and it was fun to see many of you there. 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, their sovereign wealth funds, investment banks, and so on. It was wonderful to get to know that very dynamic region better. It was a fascinating trip. The students were the usual great, and I wanted to bring to the podcast some of the things that we learned during that trip.
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. 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. Getting to know these investors gets even better when those investors happen to be Columbia Business School's alums. My guest today is not only a terrific investor, he was a wonderful host to us when we visited him in Dubai, and on top of that, he's an alum. Samer Sarraf, welcome to the Value Investing with Legends podcast.

**Samer Sarraf** (1:52)
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you. It's an honor to be part of this podcast, as I mentioned to you before, so I'm really excited about it. Thank you for having me.

**Tano Santos** (2:00)
The pleasure is all ours. Samer is a founding partner and Senior Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Amwal Capital Partners based in Dubai. Prior to co-founding Amwal Capital Partners, Samer was a partner and UAE country head at Amwal Al-Khalili's Dubai office. He joined that firm in 2008 Prior to that, Samer was a Senior Associate at Lehman Brothers based in its London office as part of the Investment Banking Natural Resources Group, M&A team. Earlier in his career at Lehman, Samer was part of its global real estate group where he led teams in the origination and analysis of commercial real estate loans as well as the structuring of commercial back securities, structuring over 2 billion US dollars of CNBS. We're going to talk about that and that experience is at Lehman. Prior to joining Lehman, Samer had four years of experience in construction management. So we're going to ask about that experience too. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, degree in civil engineering from McGill University, majoring in structural engineering. So that's the connection to construction. So it's going to be a very broad conversation about his career, investments in the Middle East, and the many things that we can expect from that great region. So Samer, welcome again to the podcast, and thank you indeed for hosting us in Dubai. Thank you. So Samer, we always start these interviews by asking our guests about the background, whether they grow up, family background and so on. So why don't you tell us a bit about yourself?

**Samer Sarraf** (3:35)
So, I mean, my background, I grew up in Jordan. I was actually born in Germany. I grew up in Jordan most of my life before going off for boarding school. And I'll talk about it in a bit. I'm originally Palestinian. My dad is an obstetrician gynecologist. My mother currently is a prone representative at a hotel. And I have one brother who is an orthopedic surgeon working out of London. My dad came from kind of modest backgrounds, really humble backgrounds. He had six siblings and a father who was basically running a manager of a post office. And unfortunately, he got sick at a very young age in his 30s and became paralyzed and was no longer able to work. And so the dynamics of that family had changed significantly by which somebody who was basically with meat was something with a luxury to eat meat once a year or twice a year. The eldest child, the sister graduated from school at 18 and started teaching and at school too he would feed the family. So he's coming from that kind of a background. And really that background of education and really focusing on education, entrepreneurship and the perseverance is something that my father kind of really instilled in me and really showed me how it's done the way he led his life, basically from nothing. And same with some of my uncles who basically one of them end up teaching the entire family and sending them all to university. And not just to any university, it doesn't matter the cost. Actually, recently my dad told me the story where he wanted to go to a university in Egypt because that was cheaper for the family, before they go for him to go out to Europe. But his older brother said that's not going to happen. You're going to Germany to become a doctor and you're not going to go be a doctor for me in a university in Egypt. And so there is that value in education that is, I mean, you see quite a bit here in this region where it becomes very important. And so this is something that God has told me and my father went to Jordan because he wanted to come back to some of the Arab countries.