I love working with talented, hungry people who have big ideas. It’s why I moved halfway across the world to Silicon Valley, and then started a company (CenterRun). When that was acquired, I tried again (Clearwell) – except better, because this time I had some relevant experience and was more able to cope with the terror and euphoria involved in leading a start-up. Looking back, at both companies I was lucky to have venture investors who helped me recover from my rookie mistakes, and who enabled me to grow from an inexperienced founder into a confident CEO. I became an investor with the goal of now helping other founders do the same.
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PartnerBain Capital Ventures 2020 - PresentSan Francisco, California, UsBCV helps technical founders build businesses around their ideas. We invest early (seed / Series A), and commit -- working closely with founders on recruiting, early customers, messaging, launch and scale. Our team brings deep domain expertise in AI, cloud infrastructure, fin-tech, and more, and taps the unique network and portfolio of Bain Capital. -
Seed & Series B Investor + Board MemberDecagon 2023 - PresentSan Francisco, California, UsDecagon is building an agentic platform for customer communication, starting with customer support. The company has grown rapidly, winning market-leading customers like Figma, Notion and Rippling. Its pace of execution is ferocious. -
Seed Investor + Board MemberContextual Ai 2023 - PresentContextual is a platform for bringing large language models (LLMs) into the enterprise, by addressing issues such as hallucination and attribution. The technology is inspired by the founders' seminal work on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at Facebook AI Research. -
Series B & D Investor + Board MemberEvenup 2023 - PresentSan Francisco, California, UsEvenUp is using genAI to build an operating system for personal injury attorneys. The company's Claims Intelligence Platform creates demand letters, medical chronologies, and other core units of work. -
Seed Investor + Board MemberMomento 2021 - PresentPacific Northwest, UsMomento is an intelligent, serverless cache that any developer can build into her app within five minutes. It instantly scales to millions of TPS with enterprise-grade availability and security, without any configurations. The founders previously built AWS DynamoDB from inception to over a billion in revenue. -
Seed Investor + Board MemberFelt 2021 - PresentOakland, California, UsFelt is a simple, delightful, browser-first mapping app that lets its users think in maps. With Felt, anyone can create a beautiful map in minutes through pre-built templates and easy-to-access data sets, and then share them publicly or privately. -
Seed & Series A Investor + Board MemberClari 2012 - PresentSunnyvale, Ca, UsClari's revenue operations platform has become the way many sales leaders run their business. It complements Salesforce to provide actionable forecasts, pipeline management and activity intelligence. -
PartnerSequoia Capital 2012 - 2019Menlo Park, Ca, UsGeneral Partner focused on Seed / Early. Over seven years, I invested in, and served on the boards of, a dozen companies. Two went public (Guardant Health, MobileIron), one is a unicorn (Clari), three were acquired for ~$1 billion each (Lightstep (ServiceNow), Skyhigh (McAfee), ThousandEyes (Cisco)), and a couple were total disasters. Privileged to learn venture investing from some of the best in the business. -
Vice President, EngineeringSymantec 2011 - 2012San Jose, California, UsJoined Symantec through its acquisition of Clearwell and served for a year on the leadership team. -
President & CeoClearwell Systems 2005 - 2011Mountain View, Ca, UsLed company from the early stages of product development to over $100m in ARR within 6 years, growing 80% YoY. Raised a total of $33m from Sequoia (seed & Series A) and Redpoint (Series B). Burned a cumulative $25m to reach profitability. Clearwell was the leading e-discovery software (legal-tech) company for enterprises and government agencies. Symantec acquired Clearwell in 2011 for $410 million. -
Founder & CeoCenterrun 2000 - 2003My first startup! CenterRun pioneered data center automation. We raised Series A from Sequoia, grew to 30 people and $5 million in revenue, and then sold the company (too early) to Sun Microsystems for $66 million.
Aaref Hilaly Education Details
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Harvard Business SchoolMba -
Mcgill UniversityEconomics
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University Of OxfordPolitics & Economics
Frequently Asked Questions about Aaref Hilaly
What company does Aaref Hilaly work for?
Aaref Hilaly works for Bain Capital Ventures
What is Aaref Hilaly's role at the current company?
Aaref Hilaly's current role is Partner at Bain Capital Ventures.
What schools did Aaref Hilaly attend?
Aaref Hilaly attended Harvard Business School, Mcgill University, University Of Oxford.
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