When Dana Baki left her corporate career and moved to Dubai 15 years ago, she knew exactly one person and had no plan for what she would do there. Years later, after making a successful transition into venture capital, then building and selling a food technology company, she found herself considering another unexpected direction when two fields kept drawing her attention: space and neuroscience. “It sounded crazy to a lot of people when I said it,” she recalls. “But you can make much bigger jumps than you think you can. You can reinvent yourself.”
By then, Dana had already learnt something about choices that make little sense on paper. Leaving a secure career at Procter & Gamble in the United States had been one of them. She knew she wanted to return to the Middle East, even if she could not yet say what her career there would look like. “The only thing I knew was that I wanted to work on economic empowerment in the region.”
With almost no network, she started meeting anyone willing to talk to her. One opportunity led to a food truck venture that proved unsustainable. Dana thought returning the remaining money would close that chapter. Instead, her investors asked her to work with them, bringing her into venture capital while the regional industry was still relatively young. “The best way to learn is to be thrown in the deep end,” she says.
Before long, she returned to entrepreneurship, co-founding MUNCH:ON and growing the business across the region to around 150 people.
When COVID brought corporate lunch orders to an abrupt halt, sales fell to zero virtually overnight. The company made it through successfully and was later acquired by Careem.
After the sale of MUNCH:ON, Dana began thinking about what she wanted to explore next. Space and neuroscience were the two fields she kept coming back to, despite having a background in neither.
“They sound completely unrelated, but to me they are connected by the same thing: they sit at the frontier of what we understand. I’ve always been drawn to places where the possibilities are much bigger than what we know today.”
When she reconnected with the founder and CEO of The Exploration Company in its early days, space became more than an interest. Dana was soon considering another leap into unfamiliar territory.
“I think we often underestimate how transferable our experience really is,” she says. “You don’t have to know everything about an industry before you enter it.”
The Exploration Company (TEC) is now one of the fastest-growing space companies globally, with orifices across Europe, the USA and the Middle East. Dana is particularly proud of the work it is pioneering in the Middle East. In the UAE, for example, The Exploration Company is working on a large lunar hopper planned for demonstration and testing in the country, while collaboration with universities is intended to help develop local expertise and help build the burgeoning ecosystem.
“When I moved to Dubai fifteen years ago, the only thing I knew was that I wanted to contribute to the region. I could never have predicted what form that contribution would take. Today, helping build a space ecosystem here feels like another expression of that same intention.
I want young people in this region not simply to participate in the industries shaping the future, but to help build them.”
Ask Dana about success now, and she makes an immediate distinction between success and achievement. “Achievement is something you can point to, a goal you reached, a company you built, a promotion, an acquisition,” she says. “Success is different. Success, to me, is something you have to define and embody for yourself every day. The question is ‘Did I live today in a way that was true to the life I actually want?’ I don’t want to spend my life sacrificing for some future point at which I finally give myself permission to feel successful.”
Her own leaps have left Dana increasingly interested in a bigger question: why do some people move towards the lives they want while others remain held back by possibilities that feel out of reach? She is developing and testing a framework examining the forces that drive us forward, the ones that hold us back, and the small shifts that can change that balance. She hopes to eventually turn the work into a book.
“You have to understand what you bring to the table, be humble enough to learn what you don’t know, and have enough confidence in yourself to make the jump.”
Fifteen years after arriving in Dubai without a plan, Dana still does not believe every step needs to be mapped out before it is taken. Her experience has taught her something more useful: knowing where you are going and knowing that you are capable of finding your way are not necessarily the same thing.
Her message for anyone standing before a possibility that feels beyond reach is simple: “Sometimes the biggest thing standing between you and what seems impossible is the belief that you need to know how you’ll get there before you begin.”
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