Free-trade zones in the United Arab Emirates are areas that have a special tax, customs and import regime, and are governed by their own framework of regulations (with the exception of UAE criminal law).

We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies.