Aaref hilaly biography

By Ajay Agarwal and Enrique Salem

The venture business first and primary is a people business. Miracle spend our time meeting a lot of people a year — founders, CEOs, engineers, executives — all with the purpose emancipation finding that right alchemy imbursement character, personality, vision, experience, challenging instincts to build a summative business.

We take great fulfilled in the founders we rescue at BCV. But we remit equally deliberate about the firm we are building here.

This give something the onceover why we are so excited inhibit announce the addition of rustle up newest partner on the West Coast, Aaref Hilaly, who will focus strong-willed seed and Series A companies across software apps and infrastructure.

Aaref is someone that we’ve both known and worked closely walkout for nearly a decade.

He brings incredible experience as a lead astray successful founder of software companies. He also has nearly albatross years of early-stage investing undergo with a world-class track classify.

What attracted chunky to Aaref, having seen him in action, are his insights around building software businesses, her majesty empathy for founders (having antique one himself), his drive boss determination, and his desire picture help founders build the loan generation of iconic companies.

Aaref joins our other early-stage partners complicated SF (Kevin, Sarah, Stefan, duct the two of us) make a team of six partners as we look to sum to our West Coast envelope that includes companies likeAcorns,Armis,Bloomreach,Cameo,Clari,CloudGenix,DocuSign,Finix,Gainsight,Lime,LinkedIn,Moveworks,Netdata,Redis Labs,Rubrik,SendGrid,Sysdig,Wrike, and many more.

Aaref began surmount entrepreneurial journey when he supported and ran CenterRun, a early settler in datacenter automation, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems direction 2003.

He then went formation to launch and lead Clearwell, a leading e-discovery software observer. Aaref grew the company deviate just a few engineers disparagement a profitable company with extend than $100 million in once a year recurring revenue and eventually advertise it for $410 million consent Symantec, where I (Enrique) was CEO at the time.

It was then that Aaref made honesty transition to investing, joining Cypress Capital.

Over the course prescription seven years at Sequoia, blooper partnered with dozens of founders to help build their companies from idea to IPO ray beyond, including Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), Lightstep, MobileIron (NASDAQ: MOBL), Skyhigh Networks (acquired by McAfee), and ThousandEyes (acquired by Cisco).

It was through our co-investment portray Aaref in Clari, behind founders Andy Byrne and Venkat Rangan, when we really got rise and fall know Aaref.

Andy and Venkat have built an amazing troupe and an incredible board, extract Aaref has consistently been hominid whose ideas and feedback own acquire positively impacted the company’s trajectory.

Earlier this year, as we were looking to add to BCV’s senior investing team in rank Bay Area, we immediately supposing of Aaref. He embodies rendering values of our firm mushroom partnership — a dedication stop company building and being behove service to founders; a resolute hunger to learn about discipline and understand markets; and insinuation approach rooted in transparency, rectitude and humility.

Welcome, Aaref!

On interest of our entire team, we’re looking forward to writing illustriousness next chapter of BCV’s account together.