VentureBeat sat down with Phil Libin, managing director at venture capital firm General Catalyst, to get his take on the state of the bot ecosystem. It was just a year ago that the former Evernote CEO joined General Catalyst as a partner. Since then, chatbots and conversational interfaces have roared into the technology mainstream, with hundreds of companies attracting more than $4 billion in funding to make thousands and thousands of bots and conversational UIs for platforms like Messenger, Slack, Alexa, and Allo, to name just a few.