Shark Tank

There is a particular kind of stupidity that only becomes available to you when you start becoming successful.

When you have nothing, decisions are surprisingly simple.

You need money. You need customers. You need somebody. Anybody, to take you seriously.

Then, slowly, people do.

And that's when things get dangerous.

By the time we walked onto the set of Shark Tank Dubai, DRNK wasn't just Mishal and me obsessing over a weird flat water bottle anymore.

Real companies were buying from us.

We had started co-branding bottles for businesses like Caterpillar and Güntner, which, for a tiny company like ours, felt enormous. There is something deeply satisfying about seeing the logo of a multinational company sitting next to the logo you designed yourself.

It makes the whole thing feel less imaginary.

We were also working on Bubblebottle, our children's range. It was completely different from the Slim bottle that had started DRNK, and that was precisely the point. We were beginning to understand that maybe we hadn't just created a product.

Maybe we were building a company.

And then Shark Tank Dubai called.

This was the sort of opportunity entrepreneurs pretend not to get overly excited about.

You tell people you're going on television for "exposure."

You say you're looking for "a strategic investor."

You use phrases like "the next stage of growth."

This is entrepreneur language for:

HOLY SHIT, WE'RE GOING ON SHARK TANK.

We asked for AED 500,000.

What happened next is still one of those moments I can replay in my head almost frame by frame.

We got two offers.

The first came jointly from Amira Sajwani and Toufic Kreidieh.

Amira was the Billionaire Heiress from from DAMAC, which was a Dubai institution. Buildings everywhere. Marketing everywhere. An enormous machine with enormous reach.

Toufic was different for me.

I knew his story.

I had watched Brands For Less grow for years.

What had started as a discount retail business had turned into a regional monster, with more than a hundred stores. This was a man who understood retail at a level I could only hope to understand one day.

And I respected the hell out of what he had built.

Their proposition was almost absurdly good for where DRNK was at the time.

Toufic told us he could have DRNK in more than a hundred retail locations within a month.

A month.

Amira said she would put DAMAC's marketing weight behind the brand.

Think about that for a second.

We were a young company trying to convince people that a water bottle didn't have to be round, and sitting in front of us were two people offering distribution, retail experience, real-estate connections and one of the biggest marketing machines in Dubai.

It was the kind of offer I should have grabbed before they had time to change their minds.

There was just one problem.

Elie Khouri was sitting a few chairs away.

I barely knew who he was.

Actually, before arriving on set that day, I didn't know who he was at all.

That changed quickly.

Elie had spent decades at the top of the advertising and media industry. He understood brands. Positioning. Perception. The invisible stuff that determines why one company sells a product for ten dollars and another somehow convinces you to pay a hundred.

And he didn't seem particularly impressed with the idea of putting DRNK into discount stores.

At one point he looked across the room and said something along the lines of:

"If you do that, you might as well change the name from DRNK to Make Me Cheap."

Ouch.

Toufic wasn't having it.

What happened next was one of those glorious moments of television that is significantly more entertaining when you aren't the entrepreneur standing in the middle of it.

Toufic told us that if we chose Elie, he could launch a similar-looking bottle and run us into the ground.

The temperature in the room changed instantly.

Elie jumped on it.

"He's threatening you," he said.

Then he looked at us.

"Do you like being threatened?"

The funny thing is, I didn't hate the threat.

I understood it.

Toufic wanted the deal.

And somewhere inside my slightly terrified entrepreneur brain, I found that strangely flattering.

This was a man whose company had grown into one of the biggest retail businesses in the region, telling me that if he couldn't have DRNK, he was prepared to compete with it.

Maybe that should have scared me.

Instead, part of me thought:

Holy shit. He really wants us.

And I wanted him too.

Not romantically.

Let's be clear.

Although at that point I probably would have considered it if he promised enough shelf space.

I wanted what he knew.

I wanted to understand how you take something small and turn it into something enormous.

I wanted access to that experience.

I wanted those hundred stores.

I wanted to sit across a table from Toufic Kreidieh and learn how the machine worked.

Looking back, I think I already knew which offer I wanted.

Then Elie changed the numbers.

Our original ask had been AED 500,000.

Elie offered that investment, and then added another AED 500,000 for marketing.

One million dirhams.

Now here's something nobody tells you about money.

It is remarkably good at making intelligent people stupid.

Up until that moment, I had been thinking about distribution.

Mentorship.

Retail.

Brand positioning.

Experience.

Relationships.

Execution.

The actual things that build companies.

Then somebody put another half-million dirhams on the table and my brain basically went:

BIGGER NUMBER GOOD.

All the sophisticated reasoning disappeared.

I saw one million instead of five hundred thousand.

And I chose Elie.

There are decisions you regret because they were obviously stupid.

Those are actually the easy ones.

You screwed up. Fine. Learn something. Move on.

The decisions that haunt you are the ones where, deep down, you knew better.

This was one of those.

Because I didn't choose between AED 500,000 and AED 1 million.

That's what I thought I was choosing.

I was choosing between partners.

Between different kinds of knowledge.

Different networks.

Different paths.

Different futures for DRNK.

But numbers have this wonderful ability to disguise themselves as logic.

A bigger number feels like a better decision.

It gives you something measurable to point at.

Look.

One million is bigger than five hundred thousand.

See?

Business genius.

Except companies aren't built inside Excel cells.

They are built by people.

And the person sitting opposite you can sometimes be worth infinitely more than the number written beside their name.

I didn't fully understand that yet.

I do now.

There are parts of what happened after Shark Tank that I can't discuss publicly, so I won't.

But I can tell you something I am allowed to say.

There hasn't been a day when Mishal and I haven't wondered what would have happened if we had made the other choice.

Not because I think Toufic and Amira would magically have solved every problem.

Entrepreneurs love rewriting history that way.

The investor we didn't choose becomes Warren Buffett.

The employee we didn't hire becomes Steve Jobs.

The opportunity we missed would obviously have turned us into billionaires by Thursday.

Life doesn't work like that.

Maybe choosing them would have created entirely different problems.

Maybe DRNK would have become something we hated.

Maybe Elie was exactly the person we were supposed to choose.

I'll never know.

That's the cruel part.

There is no parallel universe where you get to inspect the other decision.

You only get this one.

You choose a door.

It closes behind you.

And then you live with whatever is on the other side.

I used to think the biggest decisions in your life would announce themselves.

There would be dramatic music.

You would recognise the significance of the moment.

You would carefully weigh everything, stare meaningfully into the distance and make the decision your future self would be proud of.

Bullshit.

Sometimes the trajectory of your life changes because you're standing under television lights, adrenaline pumping through your body, three extremely successful people are arguing about your water bottle, and somebody says a number that's twice as big.

So you say yes.

And years later, you still think about it.