How Teamworthy Ventures manages long-term entrepreneurial relationships with Affinity

Introduction

Teamworthy Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on early stage investments and prioritizes long-term relationships with founders and impactful outcomes. Leveraging Affinity CRM, Teamworthy Ventures elevated its ability to navigate scaling a team and opening a second office while maintaining the same level of strategic support for its 70+ portfolio companies and founders. Affinity's tools have enabled Teamworthy Ventures to understand entrepreneurs on a deeper level, tailor their support, and make informed investment decisions. With Affinity, Teamworthy Ventures can now:

• Strengthen their portfolio
• Adapt to market dynamics
• Drive lasting success for both their firm and their portfolio companies

Challenge

Continuing to nurture portfolio companies while growing a team

In Venture Capital, particularly firms investing in earlier stage endeavors, you’re building and nurturing a network of founders and potential founders. Outside of having great ideas, those founders need to have a mindset around the long-term impact of what they’re building. “We have to be particularly adept at identifying entrepreneurs who have outside civilizational impact in the most positive sense; the fund metrics will be optimal over time,” said Brian Cashin, Vice President at Teamworthy Ventures.

Teamworthy Ventures is a venture capital firm with an early stage investment focus based in Greenwich, Connecticut. “We've continued to grow both in terms of the number of portfolio companies, which is over 70 at this point, and the headcount of our own team,” Cashin shared. When Cashin joined the firm in 2019, there were four full-time team members, as well as an Executive Assistant. In four years, the team has more than quadrupled and expanded to open an additional office in Nashville, Tennessee. 

With their growing portfolio came the need for a CRM that could both surface potential opportunities and align with Teamworthy’s commitment to long-term relationship development. “A lot of our data-driven work isn’t only related to sourcing the best opportunities. It’s also about developing relationships with the highest caliber entrepreneurs to ensure our portfolio companies are guided with the highest level of insight, beyond the news stories of the day,” said Cashin.

Solution

A CRM that inspires strategic, meaningful interactions

To help scale their team and continue to deliver the same level of strategic support and direction, Teamworthy turned to Affinity and has been using the CRM since early 2022. As the firm implemented Affinity, Cashin shared, “we run our meetings using Affinity dashboards and kanban views to understand who's assigned what companies and what actions are taken relative to those sets of companies.” 

Affinity provides Teamworthy a holistic view of their accounts and the activity that’s already taken place, allowing the team the capability to ensure their interactions with founders and portfolio companies are proactive and strategic. “I reflect on the importance in each and every one of these meetings to ensure that the information conveyed is devoted to this idea that an action we can take can actually substantially accelerate a meaningful growth trajectory of the company,” said Cashin.

Cashin also explains a lot of Teamworthy’s philosophy around interacting with customers is tied to when in the relationship those interactions take place. “A lot of the assignments that we make on a typical basis of introductions to customers, or partners, or new team members, or strategic mentorship opportunities are very focused on the idea that those decisions matter, not just in terms of whether or not they're taken, but when they're taken.” The team coordinates when those conversations will take place and tracks them in Affinity.

Driving decisions through data 

Teamworthy uses Affinity alongside several other data providers when making decisions around investments and time allotment. As Cashin shared, “Over time, we've decided how to balance some of our own proprietary technology that we built with the use of Affinity as a productivity and operations platform for our team.” Using data from providers such as People Data Labs, G2, and Harmonic, the firm has a scoring methodology calculated in a proprietary tool they use to evaluate which companies and teams should be the highest priority for them. 

Once they’ve been able to score these companies and teams, members of Teamworthy’s investment team prioritize existing portfolio companies and investment opportunities using the list views and capabilities of the Affinity platform. The data used to make those evaluations and prioritize opportunities comes from Teamworthy’s investment philosophy around partnering with mission-driven entrepreneurs. 

“A lot of our data-driven work is not just related to how we source the best deal opportunities and how to have that relationship with the highest-caliber engineers and companies in our country and beyond,” Cashin shared. “It’s also about how we ensure that our interactions with these high caliber companies and entrepreneurs are being guided by a level of insight beyond just the PDF that we might receive every now and then from our companies and the news articles that we can track on major events that occur in the lifetime of our companies.”

Results

An enriched way to scale a team and long-term relationships

Since implementing Affinity, Teamworthy has been able to scale their team while delivering strategic support and direction to their portfolio companies that will result in a long term partnership. “The phenomenal way in which I have seen the utility of Affinity evolve over time is initially, one can treat Affinity as a deal flow platform, where people are properly assigned the right deal opportunities, which is already useful,” Cashin shared. “However, over time, when Affinity does become the lifeblood of the operations of a venture team, you move from that process of simply sourcing opportunities to that true value creation and acceleration.”

While financial success is always a part of the goal when an investment is made, ultimately the hope at Teamworthy is to align with entrepreneurs and maintain a long-term partnership. “A lot of our success at Teamworthy has been related to this idea of realizing that the investment is Day One; you get to the right number over time if you are a closely aligned partner with the growth of the company,” Cashin shared. With Affinity, the firm can ensure they have a CRM that allows them to manage a relationship over time.