Hello listeners. Today we are releasing another episode in our series entitled Menting Unicorns, Blockchain, AI, and Dubai, sponsored by the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism, or DET.

Dubai is the new global center of gravity, connecting the world in a way few places can, from flexible regulations to tax incentives, world-class infrastructure to access to global investors managing a trillion dollars in investment money, Dubai understands what businesses need to scale fast.

Today we're speaking with Sonja Gokle, co-founder at VentureSuke, to understand how venture capital is thriving

within all that Dubai has to offer.

Well, Sonia, thank you for being on the show today.

Thank you for being on Code Story.

Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Absolutely.

Before we jump into the ecosystem in Dubai, Venturesuk, and all the great things you're doing through your investment firm, tell me in my audience a little bit about you.

So my name is Sonia Gokle. I'm a Canadian born and raised. I came out to Dubai in 2011. I'm an actuary. So I was in Canada. I was working in actuarial consulting

and then came out here working in actual estate consulting here as well. And then I started working

at one of the sovereign wealth funds in Abu Dhabi. After that, I started Venturesuke with my partners.

With myself and three other partners, Sonia Waymuller, Tamara Kadumi, and Sineal Goplay.

Very cool. That's awesome. So you did a lot of time in being an actuary. Does that mean you

studied mathematics in school? Yes, I did. A lot of math, a lot of statistics, which has really

helped me along my way, because if you actually think about it, I've switched careers a couple times. So I was doing actuarial science and then when I started working for one of the sovereign

wealth fund, I went from doing actual health consulting to started working on investments. And the way the

southern wealth funds are, they're very large. And so I had very had to quickly learn a new skill

of learning how to be on the investment side.

And the actuarial background was really helpful because I had a lot of the fundamentals that were in there for my studies there and the mathematical skills you learn.

The technical skills you learn as an actuary between modeling and understanding data is, I used it quite a lot.

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