Thibault Tughushi-Flament

My wife did. Katie is a much better networker than I am. She was already a founding member. She told me to join.

I said yes because of my own arrival. I knew nobody in Tashkent. So I went through every network I had. My MBA alumni, old colleagues, friends of friends. That is how I found my partners here. They are the reason the business works. It took months, and a lot of goodwill from other people.

Not everyone has three networks to call. The Hub is how I give that back. Make the introduction for someone else that somebody once made for me.

People think this is a new relationship. It is not. The friend who told me to come to Tashkent had a grandfather who led the Georgian engineering brigade that helped rebuilt this city after the 1966 earthquake. Georgians and Uzbeks have been turning up in each other’s countries for centuries. For better reasons in some centuries than others.

The numbers are only catching up now. Trade was about 270 million dollars in 2025. In July the two governments signed a strategic partnership and set a target of one billion. From the ground, I see that both countries are small enough that you can still reach the person who decides. Change is happening fast and Tashkent has improved on every visit since my first one.

Assuming your home playbook works here. That is the trap, and it is expensive.

In Uzbekistan the answer is people. Find the right partner and the right general manager. Then what would take a year takes a quarter. Get it wrong and capital does not fix it. We built Georgia the same way. It is the one thing I do not compromise on.

You can import a machine. You cannot import a team. We brought team members from Tbilisi to Tashkent to set the profiles and train the staff. What travels between countries is not equipment. It is a standard, and a standard travels inside a person.

Make it cheaper and faster for a company in one country to do business in the other. Fewer blind entries. Fewer founders paying separately for the same mistakes.

What I want is easy to picture. Dinner in Tashkent on Monday with Georgian companies setting up here. The direct flight to Tbilisi on Tuesday, thank you Uzbekistan Airways. Dinner there with Uzbek companies already in the Georgian market. Same week, and nobody finds it remarkable. When that is routine, the Hub has done its job.

Have someone here. Not a consultant. Not a visit every quarter. Someone who lives with the consequences. If nobody on your team will move, or spend real time on the ground, that tells you how serious the plan is.

And come more than once before you commit. One visit tells you almost nothing. What convinced me was not the first trip. It was that something had improved every time I came back.

A founder in Tashkent wants to sell into Georgia. She asks three people where to start. All three say the Hub. That is success. Not members, not events. Are we the first call, and are the companies we helped still trading.

The second one matters more to me. People still treat West and Central Asia as a place goods pass through on the way to a real market. The customers are here. In five years I would like that to be obvious rather than contrarian.

A founder in Tashkent and a founder in Tbilisi should be able to help each other before either of them hires a lawyer.