When it comes to understanding the MENA region’s Seed stage venture capital and startup ecosystem, you’d be hard pressed to find someone with a wider breadth of experience than Hasan Haider. Formerly the Managing Partner of 500 Startups’ MENA Fund, Hasan and his partner Sharif Elbadawi launched Plus.VC in the fall of 2020 to continue the work they started at 500 Startups in 2017, backing the region and its diaspora’s most exciting Seed stage founders.

Like any good entrepreneur, Hasan’s foray into this world started with a pain point he experienced as a consumer. Namely, he couldn’t get access to the DVDs he wanted to watch in Bahrain. To solve this, he founded his first startup. As I heard the rest of his journey, I realized that this “see something, do something” attitude has really guided Hasan’s career all the way up until the founding of Plus.VC. He identified the missing components in his own experience as founder, which led him to set up Bahrain’s first angel investing network. That exposed him to the region’s funding gap for Seed stage startups, which propelled him to 500 Startups. While there, he was involved in nearly ¼ of the regions’ Seed deals,  a track record that sets Plus.VC up nicely to invest “early and often in the non-obvious emerging market entrepreneurs, taking an early leadership role with founders to set them up for success.” 

Read on to learn more about why Hasan’s so fired up about the region’s potential, what it’s like raising for a VC fund in MENA, what Hasan looks for in a founder, and so much more.