on-demand
live webinar

Life after the investment: How top VCs drive value

presenters
Brian Cashin
Vice President
Teamworthy Ventures
Dan Polonka
Sr. Product Marketing Manager
Affinity

This discussion features Brian Cashin, Vice President at Teamworthy Ventures (an early stage venture capital firm) and Dan Polonka, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Affinity. The conversation focuses on the approach Teamworthy Ventures takes to drive value for their portfolio companies after making an investment, how technology can streamline portfolio support processes, and advice for VCs starting out in the industry.

The critical importance of driving portfolio value

Cashin emphasizes that while sourcing deals is essential, VCs are ultimately judged on portfolio company revenue growth and success over time. He explains that Teamworthy takes an active "venture builder" approach by accelerating growth through providing access to experts in customer development, partnerships, hiring, and strategy. To do this well, the team relies on careful coordination at weekly meetings dedicated specifically to creating value for portfolio companies.

These weekly portfolio support meetings focus on connecting companies to ideal customers, partners, and talent. While strategy is important, so is being flexible and reactive. For example, Teamworthy may bring in a subject matter expert for a portfolio company as a consultant, but that person may end up joining the company’s C-suite. Being able to respond to a company’s changing needs is vital to maximizing growth opportunities.

As Cashin describes it, the goal is to open up vectors of growth rather than simply pursuing incremental improvements in portfolio company performance. Action items from these meetings aim to accelerate meaningful trajectories.

Using Affinity to drive portfolio value and communicate approach to LPs

Affinity is core to Teamworthy's operations—not just for sourcing deals and tracking pipeline progress, but also for prioritizing existing portfolio companies and optimizing value creation activities. 

The team uses Affinity as a productivity platform within their VC tech stack, a place to consolidate and action an array of data sources. For example, by pulling in G2 data, Teamworthy can quickly view and act on subpar product reviews related to a portfolio company. Using relationship intelligence, the team identifies the strongest connection to someone in their network who can provide support and insight, and then make that introduction from a position of familiarity.

Advice for new VCs on consistency despite market changes

For new VCs, Cashin advises sticking to proven, disciplined approaches regardless of market cycles. In his own career, he has focused on talent indicators above lagging quantitative metrics to identify high-potential founders early, which is when more value can be provided. 

The metrics you choose not to track can be as important as the ones that you do track, and a platform like Affinity helps make it easy to determine what matters most for your fund’s thesis.

Learn more about Teamworthy Ventures in this case study.

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.”
Leo Walde
Partner, Armira
Read case study
"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."
Michael Lamm
Co-founder & Managing Partner, CAS
Read case study
"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."
Mirko Heide
Managing Director, IEG
Read case study
"Investment banking is nothing, if not, a relationship business, and Affinity is now core to our success."
Rudy Burger
Founder and Managing Partner, Woodside Capital Partners
Read case study
“The combination of the CRM value plus a database approach for deal flow management is ultimately why we ended up going with Affinity.”
J. Skyler Fernandes
Founder and General Partner, VU Ventures
Read case study
“What attracted us to Affinity was the fact that they were really focused on Venture Capital customers… this is a CRM for VCs.”
Nolan English
Director of Portfolio Services, SOSV
Read case study
“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.”
Amira Ouji
Senior Director of Portfolio Success, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Fund
Read case study
“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.”
Pedro Carrasco
Senior Operations Manager, Munich Re Ventures
Read case study
“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.”
Kelly Graziadei
Founder & General Partner, f7 Ventures
Read case study
"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."
Fabian Krautwurst
Principal, Cavalry Ventures
Read case study
“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.”
Amy Francetic
Managing General Partner, Buoyant Ventures
Read case study
“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.”
Sven Rossmann
Chief Investment Officer, ABACON CAPITAL
Read case study
“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.”
Caroline Haun
Operations Director, 8VC
Read case study
"Affinity Alliances truly operationalizes our executive network. I use it every day to better understand the relationships I can leverage across Fidelity."
Alessandro Vigilante
VP Corporate Business Development, Fidelity
Read case study
"We use Affinity to stay on the same page, hold each other accountable. It’s been a game changer for collaboration. "
Jocelyn Goldfein
Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners
Read case study
"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! "
Harry Stebbings
Founder, Stride.VC
Read case study
"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. "
Michael Tam
Partner, Craft Ventures
Read case study
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.
Dan Bowyer
Partner & Co-Founder, SuperSeed
Read case study
"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."
Shannon Potts
Marketing and ESG Manager, Pemba Capital Partners
Read case study
"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. "
Adam Struck
Founder and Managing Partner, Struck Capital
Read case study
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
Brian Smiga
Partner, Alpha Venture Partners
Read case study
"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."
Kevin Zhang
Partner, Bain Capital Ventures
Read case study
"We’re really impressed by the speed that the Affinity team operates and the availability of the team. "
Christian Meermann
Founding Partner, Cherry Ventures
Read case study
"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. '
Michael Sanberg
Leasing and Sales, Touchstone
Read case study
"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. "
Eric Emmons
Managing Partner, MassMutual Ventures
Read case study
"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."
Sam Endacott
Investor, firstminute capital
Read case study
"As an early stage investor, my constant focus is finding new ways to turn my connections into my portfolio’s next hundred opportunities."
Mar Hershenson
Managing Partner, Pear VC
Read case study
"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. "
Roy Hirshland
Vice Chairman, T3 Advisors
Read case study