#MentorSpotlight || Meet Harold Wiener
“A successful entrepreneur realizes the importance of passion. A good idea is critically important, but it you don’t have the passion you won’t succeed.”
Entrepreneur, investor, and on
After devoting many years to academia, earning his PHD in chemistry as well as his BA, Harold got involved in the startup scene. As CEO of several small to medium sized biomedical and tech companies, he has over 20 years of industrial and operational experience in the biotech and natural products fields.
Harold is now a General Partner at Terra Venture Partners, a multi-stage fund investing in CleanTech, medical, aging, and other fields that, as Harold puts it, “will impact the future of humanity and the way we live.”
The fund invests $700k- 1M per company and plays a very active role in their growth from development to launch. After winning the Chief Scientists North Israel tender, Jerusalem-based TVP opened an incubator in the North of Israel.
Promoting growth
The TerraLab incubator is a 18–24month long program whose primary goal is to assist the companies it invests in. Currently, there are 12 companies in the incubator working in different fields and as Harold says, “work together in helping each other solve the world’s problems. Everything is interrelated.”
The fund supports the companies it invests in by providing insights, mentoring, legal, and accounting support when needed; essentially dealing with bureaucracy so that the teams can focus solely on the growth of their companies.
Wondering if TVP is the fund for you? Harold says that most importantly, the fund looks for an original and patentable technology. If that’s you and you’re an entrepreneur needing several hundreds of thousands of dollars to really get something going, it may be a fit.
Tips from an entrepreneur and investor
A successful entrepreneur realizes the importance of passion. Even if offered an idea with potential for a huge payoff, if you’re not passionate about it, don’t work on it.
Yes, idea comes first and a good idea is critically important, but it you don’t have the passion you won’t succeed because the difficulty of running a successful startup is so extreme that to thrive, passion is essential.
