Consider the adoption rates of various technologies: for telephone and electricity, it took approximately 15 years to jump from a 50% to 75% market share. With the advent of the internet and computers, that span dropped to 10 years. Television achieved this in only 5 years. But smartphones? They shattered all records with a mere 3-year period.

The principal problem with Groupon, in my opinion, is that they have a bad business model. It basically eats by selling their customers crack cocaine- telling them to cut their prices 50% for a selected number of people. If you do that enough? You wont have a business.

Our world today is not only superficial, but also very cynical, almost to the point of nihilism. There's a cynicism that masquerades as intelligence, but which- in reality- is a form of despair, a kind of excuse for not having to do anything.

People have been told that asthma is an incurable condition, that they'll need to stay indoors and rely on a bronchodilator every few hours for life. But that's just not true. The way you breathe is deeply connected to asthma symptoms, a message that asthmatics rarely hear from anyone.

We have to have a conversation about how data can empower or oppress us- we have the opportunity to re-imagine this, it's not a deal that's been done, and it's not too late to imagine a different way of organising, regulating, collecting, contributing and benefiting.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity....

If your strategy is to do everything, you have no strategy at all.

There is an old saying in martial arts… blood and honour. In battle, you battle, but afterwards there's respect. You're giving everything in that place- you've done everything you can apart from dying, and you've shared that with this other individual. You shared blood, tears, sweat and competition. It's the height of challenge- and once that challenge is over, the better man or woman wins in that moment – and so the opponents have nothing but respect for each other.

Dubai offers a lot. We're currently at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). There's a separate jurisdictional regime in this area meaning that companies are treated under English common-law principles. It's a very safe environment for transactions to occur, and this gives us a big advantage of areas which simply do not have that framework.

By measuring skulls from 400 years ago, you'll find that our ancestors had straight teeth, prognathic faces, and very wide jaws. Compare these to modern skulls, which show very slender, narrow faces and small jaws. It's all there, plainly evident, yet it seems as though nobody is really talking about this or acknowledging the rapid changes that have occurred over just a couple of hundred years.

The most straightforward way to create value is to solve a problem. When you provide a solution to someone's problem, by default, you're generating value for that person. Consequently, my perspective is that this journey must always begin with a problem.

Architecture has the power to democratize space - to create environments where all people, regardless of their background, can participate in civic life.