At LEAP 2026, Faisal AlSaif Says Faith Carries Him Through Hard Moments
The Tech Pills and Snap Star CEO answered an unscripted question at LEAP 2026 about what sustains him when business momentum stalls.
Karim El-Sayed Karim El-Sayed covers company news, policy and regulation across the UAE and wider MENA for Anecdoted, with a focus on how new rules and licences reshape how startups operate. karim@anecdoted.com
The question arrived on a card, picked at random. Faisal AlSaif had no advance warning of what it would ask and no time to prepare an answer. He was taking part in a spontaneous round at LEAP 2026 hosted by Entrepreneur Middle East, a format built on a single card, a single unexpected question, and a response delivered on the spot.
What the card asked was personal: what keeps you going when things are not going well?
His answer was faith.
Reconnecting with and revisiting that faith, he said, is what helps him keep moving through difficult moments. The reply leaned on no framework, no growth metric, no lesson lifted from a boardroom. It pointed instead to something he returns to when the work gets hard.
Why the answer stood out
The setting made the exchange notable. LEAP 2026 draws people who build and scale companies, and the conversations around it tend to run on funding, product timelines and expansion. AlSaif, chief executive of Tech Pills and Snap Star, fits that world. He is an entrepreneur and creator working in an industry where the pace rarely lets up.
Resilience, though, does not always come from strategy, ambition or professional success. That is what his answer illustrated. When momentum slows and challenges build, the thing that keeps a person moving may not be another business plan or a productivity hack. It may be a return to grounding values and beliefs.
The two are not interchangeable. A plan can address a market problem. It does not address the fatigue of the person executing it, and founders are usually asked about the former rather than the latter.
The card format removes the option of a rehearsed answer. There is nothing to optimize in the moment, only an honest account of what carries someone through, which is why AlSaif's response offered a personal perspective on what underlies perseverance when momentum slows.
For an audience accustomed to case studies and playbooks, that lands differently. It also raises a question the industry seldom asks out loud: what happens to the person behind the company when the numbers stall?
Publication details
The interview was published on Sep 15, 2026, and written by Mina Vucic, director of production and multimedia at BNC Publishing and Entrepreneur Staff. Entrepreneur Middle East is an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. The piece is tagged LEAP 2026.
