Rayan Khraibani and the decision before the decision

A port makes an excellent place to discover how complicated a decision can become. There are ships, cranes, containers and contracts. Everything seems solid until someone asks who should operate the terminal, who should carry the risk, and how the arrangement should pay for itself. In 2006, Rayan Khraibani completed a master’s thesis that took those questions seriously. His case study was the port of Beirut.

He built a financial framework for evaluating port privatization options. It brought together different models, their advantages and disadvantages, and the risks, revenues and costs associated with them. Then he tested the framework against Beirut’s experience of assigning the management and operation of a new container terminal to a private company.

It is a revealing starting point for the co-founder and CEO of Mindsets. Long before the company’s Houston and Rotterdam announcements in 2026, Khraibani was examining the choices underneath a physical project. The cranes were the conspicuous part. The arrangement that made their work economically possible was the subject of his study.

The choices underneath the concrete

Khraibani’s education crosses three neighboring territories. At the American University of Beirut, he studied civil and environmental engineering, then engineering management. At Université de Cergy-Pontoise, he pursued a doctorate in economics, completed in 2012. His professional biography also lists a Stanford certificate in risk management and strategic decision-making.

Engineering supplies a language for structures and systems. Economics introduces incentives, resources and competing uses for money. Decision analysis makes room for uncertainty and preferences. His documented work brings those subjects together around investment choices, particularly where infrastructure connects public interests and private commitments.

That connection became explicit in a 2016 paper he co-authored with André de Palma, Nathalie Picard and Isam Kaysi. The research proposed the Transportation Elimination-by-Aspects framework, or TEBA, for evaluating large transportation projects. It aimed to elicit, organize and quantify the preferences of different stakeholder groups across alternative projects.

There is a very human problem beneath that academic title. Different people can study the same alternatives and want different things. A framework that makes those preferences legible gives them something more useful to discuss than a contest of convictions. The research sought to expose the decision rules behind rankings and help communicate information about options and criteria.

Advising where the stakes are built in

His career includes roles at Dar Al-Handasah, Strategic Decisions Group and Chevron. Across those organizations, his work involved engineering, business consulting, decision analysis and economic analysis in the Middle East and North America. His advisory experience includes urban developers, infrastructure businesses, retailers and public bodies.

At Chevron, he served as an internal decision and economic advisor for the company’s technology venture arm and its upstream business in the Saudi Arabia-Kuwait partitioned zone. His current biography also identifies work with NEOM and the Makkah Region Development Authority, alongside feasibility studies and strategic planning.

The portfolio offers a useful way to understand his professional range. A technology venture and an urban development have different operating realities. Both require choices about resources, risk and expected value. Khraibani’s specialization concerns the analysis that supports those choices, with engineering and economics providing complementary tools.

The public and private settings matter, too. An investment can be financially attractive while leaving difficult questions about the people involved, the obligations created and the arrangements needed for delivery. His published work on infrastructure investment and public-private partnership decision models sits squarely in that territory.

A classroom for the road before the journey

Khraibani has maintained an academic role alongside business leadership. AUB lists him among its Industrial Engineering and Management lecturers for 2025-26. Its graduate Strategic Management of Technology course names him as the teacher and sets out a curriculum connecting strategy development with decision analysis.

One learning objective separates selecting a strategic direction from operating effectively within it. Another deals with cognitive and motivational biases that can inhibit sound choices. Students are also expected to identify the people who should participate in strategy development and to learn how execution can be monitored and revised.

The course travels from frameworks to action. Its subjects include business and corporate strategy, risk and uncertainty, decision-making methods, and tracking progress. Lectures sit alongside case studies. The assessment includes an individual three-minute video about a new concept, tool or trend in strategy. Brevity, for once, has a formal place in the syllabus.

He also delivered an AUB seminar on October 13, 2017, titled “Strategy: in history, in books and in practice.” The seminar notice scheduled a 75-minute session in Room 202, starting at 17:30. The title made a compact promise: bring an idea with a long past into conversation with the books written about it and the demands of using it. That is also the territory between his academic work and executive responsibilities. The department selected him as its distinguished alumnus for the 2017-18 academic year. Taken together, the teaching and recognition show a continuing relationship with the university where his engineering education began.

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A business built around the people doing the thinking

Mindsets was founded in Lebanon in 2016. Khraibani’s earlier professional descriptions identify him as its co-founder and managing partner; today, the company identifies him as co-founder and CEO. Its activities have expanded across strategic consulting, project development, venture building, capital advisory, and data and AI.

His explanation of the business begins with people. “We are accordingly a talent-centric investment company,” he writes. In his CEO statement, he links the founding of Mindsets to providing an economically efficient setting in which human intellect can create value and benefit communities.

That statement gives technology a central role. He describes responsible technology as part of societal advancement and places it at the core of the company’s work. He also describes three strategic business units working together: advising organizations, developing communities and renewable energy infrastructure, and building technology startups.

The ambition extends to creating new businesses with the organization’s current and future talent. His biography says he has helped institutionalize venture creation within Mindsets. The structure gives advisory work, development and entrepreneurship a place within the same company. It also makes his executive role broader than supervising a consulting practice.

“We are accordingly a talent-centric investment company.”Rayan Khraibani · CEO statement

Houston, then a gateway in Rotterdam

In March 2026, Mindsets announced an office in Houston. Khraibani was based in the area and had previously spent two years in the city with an oil major. The expansion therefore brought a new company responsibility to familiar professional territory.

He and Assaad Mohanna were named to lead the setup and growth of the North American operation. Mohanna’s remit covers market development and strategic partnerships, including client engagement and team building. Khraibani tied the move to serving North American and Latin American clients in strategy, project development, decision analytics and venture growth.

The Rotterdam announcement followed that month. “Rotterdam is a unique gateway to the continent,” Khraibani said, explaining the choice through its logistics infrastructure, energy transition and digital innovation. Nawras Akroush was appointed to oversee European market development, client engagement and partnerships.

The European plan includes a Data & AI Studio bringing together consultants, AI engineers and data scientists. Its initial focus is mobility and transportation, supply chain and retail, and logistics. These are fields in which physical networks and information meet. They also make Rotterdam a particularly coherent next setting for a career with an infrastructure thread running through it.

When the decision reaches the factory floor

Another 2026 announcement moved the work into industrial technology. Mindsets partnered with TDK SensEI to bring edge AI to industrial markets across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The partnership combines an edge-intelligence platform with regional knowledge and consulting capabilities.

The edgeRX platform is intended to support equipment performance, reduce downtime and enable decisions closer to the machinery generating the data. Khraibani’s comments connected the partnership to predictive maintenance, operational efficiency and cost savings. The planned formal launch was at the World Advanced Manufacturing conference in Riyadh in February.

Here the language of decisions becomes operational. A manufacturer needs to judge when equipment requires attention and what intervention makes sense. Data acquires value through the action it informs. The partnership announcement sets out those objectives; achieving them belongs to the work of implementation.

That is a fitting place to leave Khraibani’s story for now. His early research examined the economic arrangement beneath a port. His doctoral work and teaching addressed how choices are structured. His company now carries those concerns into new markets and technology applications. Across that span, the consequential question arrives before the construction, the expansion or the installation: which choice deserves the commitment?