presenters
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Ray Zhou
Co-founder
Affinity
Sakib Dadi
Partner
Stage 2 Capital
Parikshit Sharma
Partner
INDIEBIO
Brian Smiga
Co-founding Partner
Alpha Partners
VCs typically make investment decisions based on exhaustive research, personal networks, and gut intuition, but technology adoption continues to change the investment landscape. More applications of unique datasets, custom scoring algorithms, and AI-powered data warehouses are becoming the norm. However, while these tools have helped firms understand the people and markets they’re investing in, companies still do not feel confident enough to solely rely on their tech stack to make decisions.
This is where Relationship Intelligence plays a key role. Relationship intelligence is a category of insights about an organization’s shared business network that drive how dealmakers spend their time finding, managing, and closing deals. Investors that tap into these insights increase their dealflow by 25% and save over 200 hours each year by automating contact and deal data entry.
But what does this really mean and how are different companies using it to build relationships and close deals more efficiently - especially as more firms face macroeconomic pressure?
In this webinar you’ll learn:
- The role data has played in helping Bessemer Ventures’ Sakib Dadi, Alpha Partners’ Brian Smiga , and Parikshit Sharma of SOSV’s IndieBio get a better understanding of their networks and thrive in today’s market
- How to use larger datasets and data enrichment to power sourcing, find investment opportunities, and create more value for your portfolio companies
- How Affinity has helped Sakib, Brian, and Parikshit incorporate Relationship Intelligence into their tech stack
Why our customers love Affinity
“We're using Affinity, and we have a way better view of our network and of who we know; and what, when, why do we know people; and when do we know that from, because previously, we didn't really. Now, we have a way better and way more effective method of engaging with the people we know, and getting productivity out of that.”
"Because Affinity is more intuitive [than our old system], you don’t have to go through a big training program. If we wanted to properly scale our old system, it would have taken up to twenty hours of onboarding training for new team members. Now, everyone is able to use Affinity immediately."
"Our clients want to know that we have key access to decision-makers. We’re able to show them this by showing them the core of our CRM system—Affinity. It’s about being honest and truthful—that is what matters to clients."
"Investment banking is nothing, if not, a relationship business, and Affinity is now core to our success."
“The combination of the CRM value plus a database approach for deal flow management is ultimately why we ended up going with Affinity.”
“What attracted us to Affinity was the fact that they were really focused on Venture Capital customers… this is a CRM for VCs.”
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“When founders come to me with requests, I use our network to source solutions. I call Affinity our ‘relationship ChatGPT’ because this is how we keep track of folks in our network.”
“Affinity creates visibility across teams, so if an investor chatted with someone […], then folks from our portfolio development team can go into that company's profile in Affinity and see how long the two have been communicating and ask for an introduction. That is the relationship intelligence that we're trying to unlock and super-power within Munich Re Ventures.”
“There are a lot of jobs to be done in venture. We’re always sourcing and fundraising, but we're also always looking to be human in those processes, and Affinity helps us do that most effectively.”
"We use Affinity Analytics to slice and dice everything to understand our decision making and see if there's a pattern. Feedback cycles in VC are long by nature. So we really try to make the most of the few information points available."
“We tracked 1,000 companies that turned into nine investments—with Affinity we now understand the characteristics that led to those investments so we can make better investments, faster.”
“A lot of CRMs provide structured data management, but in the end we had to do the data entry ourselves, and that was a no-go for us. Affinity’s automation and data enrichment meant we could focus on the thing that really matters to us: building relationships, gaining insights, and supporting the portfolio companies.”
“We've started to use Affinity Pathfinder on websites and LinkedIn, and it’s very valuable. It's easy for somebody to go to a website and see who we know without having to go to Affinity and look it up.”
"Affinity Alliances truly operationalizes our executive network. I use it every day to better understand the relationships I can leverage across Fidelity."
"We use Affinity to stay on the same page, hold each other accountable. It’s been a game changer for collaboration. "
"A product that has truly changed the way I work and made me so much more efficient across the team! Amazing and recommend to all! "
"Affinity has helped us centralize our CRM efforts in the most automated way. By organizing our pipeline, community, to-do’s, and distributing our Alliances to portfolio companies. "
We tried three market-leading CRMs but were never completely happy, and then we found Affinity. It’s genius — intuitive, flexible, super smart. What an effective CRM should be.
"Affinity has completely changed the way we do business, we are now far more organized and streamlined. Grouping advisors and target businesses using various filters and automatic logging of contact details, emails and meetings have saved us so much time in an administrative sense. If we ever have a query, Affinity is quick to respond."
"Affinity keeps us organized! It is perfectly tailored to what we need. Cataloging all of our emails and grouping them by an organization made it much easier to track contacts and report on how we’re managing deal flow. "
I built one of the first CRMs — Dynodex — in 1989, I feel like I’ve been waiting for a decent replacement for 30 years, now I’ve found it in Affinity. It automates many of the rote tasks and “digital fork-lifting” of legacy CRMs
"All our data is now centralized in Affinity, so information is never siloed with a single team member and we all understand the relationships among the entire team’s business network."
"We’re really impressed by the speed that the Affinity team operates and the availability of the team. "
"Managing your relationships is everything in commercial real estate. Affinity allows us to manage more clients and all our data in one place. That will lead to more top-line for our business. '
"Within weeks of moving to Affinity, we were able to easily discover and manage the thousands of entrepreneur and venture community relationships already latent within our team. What’s more, the Affinity Alliances professional network has helped us quickly build new and valuable connections. "
"Having all the documents and information in one place without having to clamp around on different systems is really valuable. Affinity is a massive time saver and enables us to be super-efficient."
"As an early stage investor, my constant focus is finding new ways to turn my connections into my portfolio’s next hundred opportunities."
"With Affinity, my team and I can track and nurture all of our firm’s most important relationships. In an industry like real estate, Affinity gives us a competitive advantage. "
