Replay - The Biggest Misconceptions About AI Agents, Why Defensibility Doesn't Matter at Seed, and Whether the AI Center of Gravity Is Shifting to China (Aaref Hilaly)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast efficient and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Arif Hilali joins joins us today from San Francisco. He's a partner at Bain Capital Ventures and has backed several unicorns, including startups like Contextual, Dekagon, and EvenUp. Before Bain, he was a partner at Sequoia Capital, where over seven years, he invested in a dozen companies, two of which went public, Garden Health and MobileIron, one is the Unicorn, Clari, and three were acquired for 1,000,000,000 each, including LightStep, SkyHigh, and ThousandEyes. Arif began his career as a founder, first of Centerrun, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and he also founded one of the earliest AI driven search startups, Clearwell. Arif, welcome to the show. Thanks very much, Nick. It's great to be here. It's such a pleasure to have you, sir. So can you give us a a bit of your background and your your path to venture? My background is I I grew up in London, and so was not from here. I came here because I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and really that that was the goal when I moved to Silicon Valley after grad school. And I I loved building my two companies, Centron and ClearWell, that you mentioned over a ten year period. ClearWell, we got up to about a 100,000,000 in ARR in six years before we sold the company to Symantec. And the plan really was to be an entrepreneur, but once we sold the company, which was not sort of happened spontaneously when we got an offer, at that point, my investors, who had been Mike Moritz at my first company and Jim Getz at the second company, both and partners at Sequoia, came over and suggested that I I think about venture. And and that was really how I came into the business. Very good. And tell us a bit more about the thesis at BCV and and where your focus area is. Bain Capital Ventures. Most people are familiar with Bain Consulting. Bain Capital is separate from that, but we're we're kinda like cousins. So Bain Capital came out of Bain Consulting in the nineteen eighties when a group of then Bain consultants said, well, instead of advising, why don't we improve the operations of these companies? And so they they split out and raised a fund and purchased a handful …