About The Speaker
Sharif El-Badawi
Managing Partner of Plus Venture Capital (+VC).Sharif El-Badawi is a founding Managing Partner of Plus Venture Capital (+VC), the leading seed stage investment firm in the Middle East and North Africa region, where he invests across sectors from seed to growth within the region and diaspora. Previously, he co-founded and managed the first US-based venture capital firm with a dedicated fund for the MENA region and was the most active venture capital investor in the region during its investment period from 2017-2020. In his role, he manages the 500 Startups MENA fund, 500 Falcons, which invested in over 180 startups across 15 countries.In addition, Sharif serves on the board of San Francisco Bay Area based non-profit TechWadi where he was the chairman of the board from 2015-2019 helping build meaningful bridges between MENA startups and Silicon Valley. He also serves on several advisory boards for startups, organizations and governments in the MENA region and Silicon Valley.Prior to his career in investing, Sharif was the Partner Lead to VCs and Startups at Google where he worked with top tier VCs and their most promising startups on strategies that bring all of Google to their businesses. Before joining the Global Partnerships team, he spent 5 years leading performance advertising strategy and solutions for Google's largest customers in North America covering Mobile, Search and Display ads. He joined Google through the $750m acquisition of AdMob, the world’s leading mobile advertising network. Before AdMob, Sharif was a technologist and serial entrepreneur having founded or co-founded several companies in the Consumer Internet and B2B space over a twelve year period starting in 1998.Sharif earned his Master of Business Administration from University of California, Irvine Merage School of Business and his Bachelor’s of Science in Neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles. He recently relocated from his home state of California to Dubai with his wife and three children.