How Roble Ventures builds a VC operating system for the future

Introduction

Roble Ventures is a US-based venture capital firm focused on investing in the future of work. The founding team of three realized they needed a tech stack that would empower them to make fast, data-driven decisions to compete with larger firms, and ultimately to help them scale their fund.

Affinity provides Roble with an easy way to manage deal flow and automate manual tasks, all while integrating with the rest of their tech ecosystem and allowing them to deliver end-to-end support to their portcos.

With Affinity, Roble Ventures can:

• Effectively run Monday meetings with Affinity’s kanban view, which makes it easy to view and discuss updates and next steps
• Review 1,000+ companies a year with a team of two investors and one operations associate
• Scale a seamless portco onboarding experience using Affinity’s Typeform integration, intaking relevant information to match founders with the right advisors

Challenge

Building a firm and tech stack from the ground up

Starting your own venture firm is no easy feat. You’re responsible for raising funds, sourcing and investing in high-quality deals, and supporting a growing portfolio. As you build out those processes, it’s incredibly important to have the right tools in place to maintain a competitive edge.

Sergio Monsalve, founder of Roble Ventures, did just that when he started his firm after 15+ years in venture capital. "When I started Roble a few years ago, I had the vision of having a new way to run a firm with technology as well as people, and divide the labor in the proper way," he says. Roble invests in the future of work, and Monsalve wanted to ensure he could carry out that philosophy in the way the firm operated.

"I wanted to build a firm that was very customer centric and uses humans for what humans do well and systems for what systems do well," says Monsalve. "We call it a human enablement technology—it's not just about where we invest, it's how we do work, so that we can actually be very customer centric and very employee centric."

This meant coming in with a blank slate. "We started from scratch,” says Monsalve. “There was no technology, so we had a white sheet of paper, and we said, 'Okay, what systems do we need to really scale, and not only scale, but just give the customer—our entrepreneurs—the service they need.'" 

Monsalve had a clear vision of how he wanted Roble to operate, which included competing with more established firms and providing exceptional portco support. To do this, he needed to build a tech stack that could enable a team of three people to spend less time on manual work and more time on value-add activities. 

Solution

A VC OS of the future, powered by Affinity

After evaluating multiple platforms, Roble Ventures chose Affinity as their CRM because of its broad integrative capabilities.  "We landed with Affinity because it has the flexibility, customization, and integration with other systems that we need,” Monsalve shares. "In order to build a VC operating system of the future, you absolutely need to have the open standards to integrate with other systems. We have about 14 different systems, and a lot of them integrate with Affinity, which is great."

The firm’s pre and post-investment approach borrows from SaaS best practice, with Affinity serving as the central platform for managing each workflow. Monsalve explains, "With Affinity, we think of our firm as a real sales customer support process. Not much different than how an enterprise software company would run. So we have a funnel of opportunities, of advisors, of LPs. Depending on the constituency, we have a set of screens that we go through in Affinity to work through that funnel."

Creating a funnel with a single source of truth

Setting up a funnel system to capture and manage their data allows Roble to systematically manage deal flow from initial contact to investment and beyond.

"In the case of companies, we have an entry point,” says Monsalve. “The entry of the funnel is where a company submits their idea or plan. On Monday mornings, we review that, and then we push it through the funnel to meet with a company, do the diligence, eventually win the deal, close the deal, and then serve the company through a lot of the value-add support that we provide. Affinity is at the epicenter of all that."

During these stages, different tools integrate with Affinity to create a cohesive workflow that captures all necessary information in one centralized system. At the earliest stages, for example, the firm can see who has attended which webinars and then create hyper-targeted lists in Affinity to send relevant automated emails through integrations with Zapier and MailChimp. 

Monsalve explains, "The automated emails are important because they come from us, but it's automated through Zapier, Typeform, and Affinity so that we could actually send them the thank you emails and say, 'Hey, what did you think of the meeting? Here's the next step. We're gonna get back to you within five days.'"

The firm’s Typeform submissions automatically populate records in Affinity, ensuring efficiency in the Monday meeting. "The way we manage our Monday meetings, I think the kanban concept is so visual. We have inbound, outbound, first meeting, diligence, and tracking columns with the triggers," explains Monsalve. "Tracking has to have a trigger, because it cannot live in tracking forever. Tracking is almost like no man's land... Once you reach that milestone, please—when do you think you will reach it? And then we put a trigger."

This structured approach ensures that no opportunity falls through the cracks and that the team can seamlessly track and manage deals at every stage of the pipeline.

Providing ongoing support at the end of the funnel

Relationships are vital to helping the Roble team win deals and grow portcos. Affinity’s relationship intelligence has unlocked Monsalve’s network—and the decades of strategic relationships within it—for the whole team, helping them quickly identify who to bring into each deal or portfolio support request.

Monsalve says, "One of our companies was really thankful that we could introduce them to an advisor that ran an enterprise application-layer financial software company. To be that granular, you need to have a big network."

Results

Continuing to operate and scale towards the future

Affinity has helped Roble Ventures create an operationally efficient set of workflows that allow the lean team to do the work of what Monsalve estimates should take 8-10 people, while maintaining high-quality due diligence and entrepreneur relationships.

"With two people on the deal team, and another person working with us on the platform side, we've been able to process over 1,000 deals in a given year,” he shares. “If you think about all that it takes to process 1,000 deals, including meeting with most of the founders, diligencing some of them, and then processing all that information, the per-day throughput is incredible."

With Affinity at the center of their robust tech stack, Roble spends less time on tedious tasks that are instead automated, and more time on the strategic work that lends itself to the level of support they aim to offer. "The ambition of the firm is to run the most sophisticated but the simplest VC operating system, where the human will do the human stuff we’re good at, making and strengthening our connections with founders, other investors, and domain experts, and the computer will do its thing," Monsalve shares.

With an integrated tech stack that allows the firm to deliver exceptional service to founders while evaluating a high volume of opportunities, Monsalve next plans to scale their use of Affinity to encompass LP management, advisor networks, and post-investment services.