Alex Jotic sold his stake in a US software services business in 2023, moved to Dubai, and now runs a company that relocates other people's employees to the UAE. Described that way it sounds like a tax play, and most of the coverage of this migration treats it as one.
The tax is the least interesting part.
Alex built and exited a company with around eighty people on payroll. He still cannot get a mortgage. Roughly 40% of the people he employs can, and for most of them it is the first time in their lives.
I moved to Dubai in November, out of a suitcase, after several years of not really living anywhere. Most of the people I know here came the same way, from crypto and fintech, and the conversation is always about tax. It is almost never about credit. After sitting with Alex for an hour I think we have been discussing the wrong thing.
The arbitrage everyone describes
The mechanics fit in a sentence. A US company pays a consultant in the UK $150,000 a year. Instead it pays $120,000 through Alex's UAE entity, the consultant becomes a UAE resident and employee, and takes home more than before. Employment tax in the UAE is zero. Alex keeps the spread.
His numbers for the source countries are worth writing down, because they usually get quoted wrong. Employer-side cost in Serbia is about 37% of gross salary. In Germany, where he had staff, closer to 42%. These are not marginal income tax rates. They are the cost of the employment relationship itself, and the employee never sees them, because the employee only ever sees the net.
To hold UAE residency and stay employable through a UAE entity, he says you need one day in the country every six months. The binding constraint is not the UAE side. It is the country you left. Most jurisdictions use 183 days as the residency threshold, but the tests run wider than time. Germany, he points out, can treat you as tax resident if you own a garage there. Keep assets or a centre of life behind you and the structure does not hold.
Which rules out almost everyone. A doctor in a UK hospital cannot do this. Neither can a lawyer. What remains is a narrow population: high earners who already live nowhere in particular. Alex describes them without any romance, as Germans not living in Germany and British people not living in Britain, moving between Thailand, Brazil, Colombia and Greece while still paying tax at a home base they barely occupy. He reckons around 90% of digital nomads do this. He finds it baffling. It is also his entire addressable market.
The arbitrage nobody describes
Alex is Serbian, and he has never been eligible for credit anywhere.
Not in Serbia, where he says there is no globally connected bank and where loans and credit cards are not realistically available to someone like him. Not in the US, where he built the operating business, because he never held a social security number. Not now in Dubai either, because he is a founder rather than an employee, and founders are close to unbankable for personal credit almost everywhere outside the United States.
He built a company, hired eighty people, sold a stake, and stayed outside the credit system the entire time.
His employees are inside it. Three months of payslips through the UAE Wage Protection System and they can start a mortgage pre-approval. Six months and the credit cards open. He works with HSBC among others. Around 40% of his staff are taking home loans, most of them for the first time.
Set that against how founders talk about wealth, where equity is the asset and salary is the consolation prize. What Alex is describing runs the other way, and it is not a sentimental point. It is a statement about what banks will lend against. No bank will underwrite an equity stake in a private services business. It will underwrite a verified, regular, state-tracked wage. A payslip is legible to the financial system in a way that ownership is not.
Credit is leverage, and leverage is what compounds. The employee with the boring payslip gets a mortgage, then a property, then an asset to borrow against. The founder, nominally the wealthier of the two, compounds only out of cash flow.
This is worth sitting with if you are building anywhere with a shallow financial system. The constraint is often not capital formation but capital access, and they are not the same problem. You can run a profitable business for a decade and still have no route to any instrument that turns income into leverage.
On buying service businesses
The second half of the conversation is more directly useful if you underwrite this category, because Alex has both built and acquired in it.
The arithmetic that pulls people in: a developer costs $3,000 to $4,000 a month in Eastern Europe and bills at $7,000, so a hundred of them should throw off $300,000 a month. He is blunt that this is never true, and specific about why. Sales dominates the cost base and scales badly. He puts the cost of reaching a single enterprise vendor list in the hundreds of thousands, before anyone awards a project. None of that shows up in the per-head margin that made the model look good.
Then cash flow. One strong client scales to fifty seats, is late on one invoice, and the business is under strain, because it is concentrated and because Eastern European banks will not bridge it. No facility. It is the personal credit problem again, one layer up.
His diligence heuristic is the sharpest thing in the interview and costs nothing to use: tell them you want to buy the business. Then they have to open their books. He says they did this repeatedly without needing the customers, purely to see what these companies looked like underneath. What they found was usually worse than the presentation.
The structural discount follows from the same place. In most of these firms the founder sits so deep in delivery and relationships that a week of illness makes the business wobble. That is why services multiples stay low no matter what growth looks like.
His own approach was the opposite of a growth story. Find the firms already on the vendor lists you want. Work out who makes the recommendation, which is usually visible. Pay for the introduction. Take the smallest project on offer. Then stay, because once you are on a vendor list at a large enterprise the relationship runs for years and the maintenance revenue starts behaving like contracted ARR rather than services income. He calls it a decade-long game and says he would not do it again.
The capital protocol
With his own money he is deliberately boring. Half of whatever is left after monthly costs goes in, split roughly 80% index funds, 10% bitcoin, 10% gold, and then he leaves it alone. His reasoning is that if the largest global companies go to zero, the problem is not one a portfolio was ever going to solve.
He paid for this position. He lost about $30,000 in crypto at a point when $30,000 was a lot of money to him, having been up around 400% and holding out for more. He is unusually direct about it, including the part people normally leave out: the time and attention cost more than the capital did.
On location he cites a figure he heard and cannot source, that 70% of economic growth over the next twenty years will happen in twenty cities. Treat it as his lens rather than a finding. Whether or not it survives scrutiny, it is visibly how he decides. Be where the volume is and be present, instead of trying to be exceptional somewhere it is not.
What this is actually about
The move to Dubai gets narrated as people running from tax. Some of it is. The more durable version is that a particular group, mostly from countries with shallow financial systems, found a jurisdiction willing to issue them the one document the global banking system respects. A verifiable, regular, state-registered payslip.
That is not an exit from the system. It is an entry into it, through the only door that was open.
The founders in this picture are the ones still standing outside.
Alex Jotic runs a UAE payroll and relocation business and previously built and exited a software services company. He appeared on Venture Protocol in episode 01, "Routing European Income Through the UAE." The full transcript is published alongside the episode.
