New Affinity features for external collaboration, scalable calculations, and richer profile insights

Affinity is focused on continually helping customers execute the full spectrum of dealmaking workflows with ease–from sourcing deals and managing portfolio companies to successfully exiting and raising new funds.

In our Q4 2023 product release webinar, we sat down with two of our Product Managers, Jamie Fronckowiak and Annette Fleishman, to walk through three new Affinity features that will help streamline your workflows and maximize efficiency:

• Collaborator Seats
• Formula Fields
• Employee Growth Insights

Watch the full webinar for detailed walk-throughs of these new features or keep reading for the highlights, marked with timestamps so you can hone in on key moments.

Collaborator Seats: Share data securely with external partners

Starts at 1:59

Collaborating with external partners is a crucial part of the VC workflow. Collaborator Seats make it easy to share up-to-date information with founders, limited partners (LPs), and investors in a controlled way, allowing you to be a more effective and confident collaborator.

Specifically, this new feature enables you to securely share Affinity lists–with real-time data on people, companies, and deals–right from your CRM.

Collaborator Seats facilitate workflows across several core VC objectives:

Accelerating portfolio company growth

Starts at 2:47

Collaborator Seats make the VC-founder relationship more seamless. Use Collaborator Seats to provide founders with access to datasets that can help kickstart portfolio company growth, including:  

• Talent lists to help portfolio companies find their next top hires
• Curated investor lists to help identify potential investors for their next funding round
• Company lists to find and facilitate introductions to new vendors or potential customers

Driving repeat fundraising, referrals, and co-investments

Starts at 3:44

Collaborator Seats can streamline how you work with LPs during fundraising and how you partner with co-investors. Increase the visibility of and confidence in your fund strategy through sharing:

• Deal lists with LPs or co-investors
• Detailed information about your thematic investing plans to show LPs that you’re actively fulfilling the commitments you made during fundraising rounds
• Opportunity lists with core insights for investors and advisors

Delivering exceptional and secure experiences

Starts at 4:34

Data security and streamlined user experiences are top priorities with Collaborator Seats. You can provide real-time insights into the information you want to share while protecting the information you want to keep private. This means that external partners can’t access your data beyond what you explicitly share with them. 

Administrators have flexible security and permissions settings related to Collaborator Seats: 

• To share lists with external partners (Collaborators), navigate to the new section under Settings called “Collaborators”
• By default, Enterprise Admins and Admins have access to this feature and have the ability to share lists with Collaborators
• You can edit who has access to Collaborator permissions, potentially expanding access to standard users or removing access from default Admin users
• In this view, you can also invite new Collaborators, remove Collaborators, and set Collaborator type (Founder, LP, Co-investor, or Other) to keep external partner groups organized

A walkthrough of sharing lists

Starts at 6:40

Let’s explore what happens when you share a list in Affinity with a Collaborator:

1. The Collaborator is sent a dedicated email with an intuitive, secure log-in link using Magic Links. Their access link can’t be forwarded to anyone else, and they must confirm their identity to log in.
2. Once the Collaborator logs in, they’re taken to a Collaborator dashboard in Affinity, where they can view the list that has been shared with them.
3. Crucially, the Collaborator has a “read-only” experience, meaning they can’t edit the data in the list or navigate to profiles to see details like communication histories.
4. Their list automatically updates at the same time as yours–offering a real-time sharing experience

Formula Fields: Save time by making calculations in Affinity lists

Starts at 10:48

Our new Formula Fields feature allows you to conduct simple calculations (add, subtract, divide, multiply, and mean) across multiple fields in Affinity lists so that you don’t have to take data out of Affinity. Formula Fields offers a more automated and accessible approach to save you time, so you can focus on finding new deals and supporting your portfolio companies. 

Specifically, you can:

• Perform calculations across multiple fields from inside a list
• Use formulas that mix data from fields you created and from Affinity data
• Make it easier to move calculated data across views by adding your new calculated field in lists, board view, and company profile view

Deal scoring

Starts at 12:15

Oftentimes, teams score deals during initial due diligence to decide whether to invest in further diligence in a company. Deal scoring is a key workflow that Formula Fields supports. 

Here’s how you can use Formula Fields to calculate average deal score: 

1. Start by creating a new number field in Affinity lists for each member of your team (e.g. Score 1, Score 2, Score 3…). Each team member can add their rating of a company or deal to their respective score field
2. From there, you can create a final field (e.g. Average Score) and select a new formula option
3. You can build a formula using each team member’s deal score field, define the function (e.g. average), and save the field. Your list will automatically calculate an average of your team’s deal scores
4. You can also sort your lists based on the average deal score, or filter your lists to find the deals with the highest-ranking scores

Find out more about Formula Fields and other common use cases in this blog post.

Employee Growth Insights: Make employee growth data more actionable

Starts at 16:08

As a common signal of a company’s growth and traction, employee growth is an important metric for investors to track. In addition to displaying employee growth data in Affinity lists (under Data Growth Fields), we’ve added a new, intuitive view in Profiles that surfaces useful data points and insights about a company in a singular view.

This allows you to dive into the details without going into lists, so you can spend less time gathering information and more understanding how potential LPs, prospective investments, and portfolio companies are focusing their hiring.

In this new view, you can look at employee growth data in a more actionable way, allowing you to make decisions faster. You can:

• View total employee count and trends over time, including how numbers have trended MoM, QoQ, and YoY
• Gauge the maturity of a company using filters for seniority levels and job functions, helping you to better understand a company’s growth story
• See growth insights on companies, both within and outside of your network.

To find out how to get the most out of these new Affinity features, watch the full webinar. You’ll learn more about how to:

• Provide portfolio companies and investors with a secure, collaborative environment with new licensing options
• Better tap into company growth insights
• Save time when analyzing deal flow with new Formula Fields
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