Each year, Campfire brings together hundreds of the world’s top dealmakers to discuss investment strategies, industry trends, and innovative ways to weave relationship intelligence into day-to-day operations—optimizing deal processes and fueling growth.
This year’s event took place on October 22 and featured exciting new product launches, as well as insights from Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins, MassMutual Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and others. Keep reading for a deep dive into the top 10 takeaways.
1. AI-powered Deal Assist drives productivity gains
The Affinity platform makes it easier for firms to centralize their data via automation and enrichment. In the past few months, the launch of Affinity Notetaker has also automated the process of note-taking during meetings, offering highly accurate transcripts, insights, and next steps that are automatically saved in the Affinity CRM.
Remi Fournier, a Partner at BDC Capital, shared with us how the tool improves his team’s collaboration and quality of work. He said, “It saves us hours of work each week by capturing and summarizing both internal and external meetings, providing actionable insights for our investment process, and syncing key takeaways and tasks for the team right into Affinity so everyone can stay informed and remain productive.”
Now, with Deal Assist, the conversational AI tool launched at Campfire, dealmakers have a seamless way to interact with their data. “Deal Assist is a new way to chat with your deal data and get questions answered about a specific company based on the notes and files associated with that company,” said Katrika Morris, Head of Product Design.
Affinity customers can use Deal Assist to ask questions across all the information in their CRM, minimizing the steps and time it takes to sift through information to locate data and conduct deal analysis.
Extantia, an early adopter of Deal Assist, described the impact it has had on their firm’s productivity. Jan Olsson, an Investor at Extantia, said: "Deal Assist has been incredibly helpful with finding information on any deal very quickly. Especially in the later stages of a deal, when the amount of data gathered becomes overwhelming.” Learn more in the press release or by watching the video below.
2. Affinity for Salesforce supports multi-strategy firms
Multi-strategy firms face unique challenges—workflows are more numerous and complex, CRM users include both investment and non-investment teams, and there can be up to 100x more activity to capture for the CRM to be an accurate system of record.
And while many multi-strategy firms use Salesforce, the platform isn’t optimized for dealmaking workflows. This is where Affinity for Salesforce comes in: allowing firms already using Salesforce to enhance their existing CRM without needing to start from scratch.
Firms can use Affinity for Salesforce to benefit from Affinity's relationship intelligence and dealmaking capabilities, ensuring smooth integration across the entire organization.
By offering both a standalone CRM and a Salesforce enhancement, Affinity provides the flexibility that multi-strategy firms need to implement a CRM that suits their organizational structure, without disrupting existing workflows for non-investment teams.
As customer Brian Murphy, Lead Data Scientist at Salesforce Ventures, puts it, “We can bring what’s special about Affinity to the world of Salesforce with Affinity for Salesforce.”
3. New CEO announces key themes for 2025
Affinity’s new CEO, Ken Fine, joined the team earlier this year and outlined his plans to lead Affinity to its next stage of growth in his keynote at Campfire. With onboarding that included meeting with every company employee and more than two dozen customers and prospects, he shared his key findings:
- Affinity is mission-critical
- Activity capture minimizes manual data entry
- Relationship management is central to coordinating deal strategy
- Affinity enables collaboration across firms
But there is still work to do. Fine announced that Affinity’s focus in 2025 will be on three key areas: optimizing workflows, improving data quality, and increasing data access. He said, “I joined Affinity because I saw an opportunity. Data-driven investing is a credible, powerful trend that is driving success for top firms—and Affinity is at the forefront of that."
These changes will further enhance the platform for users, while also making it easier and faster to ship new features in the future.
4. Invest in data—not building purpose-built solutions
In a session on transforming investment strategies through technology and insight, Moustafa ElBialy, CIO at Kleiner Perkins, shared his perspective on where VCs should focus their resources. He said “Invest in scalable solutions. Invest in your data. It's not always about the tools you're using, but about your ability to aggregate your data.”
On whether to build or buy technology solutions, he had this advice: “Affinity has enabled us to avoid the need to spend a lot of money, time, and talent on building a purpose-built solution—and instead use an out-of-the box tool specifically tailored to VCs' needs.”
Ultimately, ElBialy notes that “Venture capital is a craft, and Affinity is one of those tools that can help build that craft better.”
5. Digitize workflows to save both time and money
Jen Ard, Managing Director and Head of Investment Operations at Intel Capital joined us to share her unique perspective on digitizing VC workflows. Prior to adopting Affinity, Intel Capital realized they needed more robust, real-time pipeline management capabilities. They’ve now implemented Affinity across their organization and benefit from an automated integration with Salesforce.
Speaking about the process, Ard shared, “It was really seamless. The team was fantastic to work with; they checked in regularly. My experience [when working with Affinity Solution Engineers] is that they are so helpful.“
These system enhancements have saved time and money for Intel Capital, including:
- More efficient deal sourcing and tracking, as deal notes are automatically organized and posted to profiles
- Easier to track company/investor contacts and collaboration on deal pipeline
- More efficient tracking of velocity and quality of pipeline to support leadership accountability
- Real-time analytics that enable real-time decision-making
- Better ability to report on coverage in specific domains to LPs
6. Centralize data to drive productivity and accountability
Centralizing data was a common topic at Campfire, with Casey Rovinelli, Partner of Data & Technology at OMERS Ventures, outlining how his team uses APIs and integrations to embed the value of Affinity into their databases and workflows.
Rovinelli discussed the need for a shared system of record to drive productivity and accountability, saying, “If it’s not in a system or workflow, it’s best intentions. It’s never gonna happen.” The team uses Affinity’s extensible capabilities to build workflows that support their deal flow. Rovinelli said, “We’re heavy users of the Affinity API in our internal Discovery Platform. Affinity does all the hard work. It helps us keep investors internally accountable.”
Rovinelli went on to explain how the Affinity API has streamlined part of their sourcing process. He said, “We had a process where, once a week, we looked at all the deals done by VCs we looked up to. We ran them by investors to find out if we had talked to this company in the nine months prior and whether it was regrettable (i.e. we didn’t invest). With the Affinity API, we just filter companies we’ve talked to in the previous nine months.”
Further, he explained, “With v2 of the API, we can easily set up a view of the companies we’ve seen in the last nine months. What used to take thousands of calls now takes 1-2 calls.”
Dan Brown, Head of Product and Tech at Speedinvest, also contributed to this conversation. He shared how his team has used APIs and integrations to build a portal for Speedinvest's founders that streamlines their ability to request introductions to potential customers, co-investors, consultants, and other portco founders.
They’ve developed systems for scaling up their pipeline by making it easier to analyze and display data from Affinity in other vital tools across their techstack—view the help scripts via Github.
7. Operationalize portfolio growth with relationship intelligence
While deal sourcing is a vital VC workflow, it’s not the only one—or the only one that benefits from the advanced network management offered by relationship intelligence. Samantha Santaniello-Lawrence, Head of Platform: GTM, BD & Strategic Partnerships at MassMutual Ventures (MMV), spoke about the firm’s approach to portfolio growth and investor relations.
Santaniello-Lawrence began by explaining, “When I joined MMV, there was no consistent way our portfolio companies were getting introductions and support... when I came on board, it was to institutionalize this effort."
The team uses Affinity to manage a growing network of contacts that can support portfolio companies. The ability to measure the impact has been a game-changer. Santaniello-Lawrence said, “Talent has been an emerging theme: being able to quickly hire talent for our portcos. When an exit takes place, and we like working with a portco's CPO, we'll add them to a talent list in Affinity to play matchmaker with future companies."
8. Know when to scale operations to maximize action and adoption
Sozo Ventures Principal, Lauren MacDonald, joined us at Campfire to discuss how Sozo scaled their operations using Affinity. MacDonald found that, “When we raised our Fund III, it became apparent that a deal flow management system was necessary. Deals are messy with a lot of hands involved at once. Knowing all the stakeholders and what info they need is critical.”
The need partly arose because of how geographically dispersed Sozo Ventures is. McDonald shared, “There are very few opportunities for overlap. We needed a platform in place for asynchronous work and getting to what matters quickly.”
In terms of a feature MacDonald recommends to firms that want to scale operations as their team grows, status triggers are high on the list. She explained, “These help with data so much because they require your team to input necessary data prior to action any status changes.”
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9. Build a customer-centric system to support inbound deal sourcing
One of the final sessions of the day featured Sergio Monsalve, Founding Partner at Roble Ventures. He explained how he created a VC operating system that allows the team to diligence more than 1,000 deals each year, saying, “When it comes to process, we always think about how we can systematize things.”
Another founding value was customer-centricity. Monsalve shared, “We think of our entrepreneurs as the center of our world.” Today, this network-driven approach means that 88% of their deals originate either from a tipoff or are directly referred by their network.
10. Affinity achieves ISO 27701 certification
Finally, in addition to the products announced at Campfire 2024, Affinity is evolving behind the scenes with a new security certification that demonstrates our commitment to privacy.
Dealmakers know that Affinity’s relationship intelligence is so powerfully accurate because it’s based on the automated processing of email and calendar data. The responsibility we have over this data is something we take very seriously, which is why we are proud to announce we have achieved ISO 27701 certification, the global standard for managing and protecting personal data.
Discussing the significance of this milestone for Affinity and our customers, Peter Romano, Vice President of Information Security, said, “This accomplishment highlights our forward-thinking stance on data privacy, our commitment to adhering to international privacy laws, and our ongoing endeavors to reassure our customers that their confidence in us is justified.”
Get more Campfire highlights
These may have been our top 10 takeaways from Campfire 2024, but there were plenty more. Join our newsletter to find out when the on-demand sessions are available to watch online (and when registration for Campfire 2025 opens!).
In the meantime, we’ll leave you with this quote from one of our speakers, Jolynn Vallejo, Chief of Staff at Kapor Capital. It sums up why we built Affinity, and the role Campfire plays in bringing our community together: “Venture capital is the industry of relationships.”
Thanks to all our speakers and attendees for making Campfire 2024 such a success.
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