The investment industry is fast-moving and competitive relationship intelligence is crucial to winning the Marathon of VC. Affinity’s Campfire London gave 250+ VCs & LPs attending a look behind the scenes with some of the best.

We’ve digested the panels so you can quickly pinpoint where to focus when visiting the virtual Campfire here 👇

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The realities of operating in the 2020 series investing environment

Presenters

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TL:DR

To describe the past two years as outliers in private markets might be an understatement to many.
With a more sobered pullback seen leading into 2023, investors are facing the challenges of standing out amongst a larger set of competitors in a smaller pool of deals.
The panelists emphasized the importance of in-house planning and helping portfolio companies plan efficiently while recognizing a shift in how deals are viewed, with a focus on data related to unit economics, profitability, and execution.
While data is important for predictive analytics, the strongest deal signals are relationship-based, and the ability to work together for the long term is based on soft data.
As we look to the future, let us learn from these experts and continue to adapt, grow, and build strong relationships in the ever-changing investment landscape.

Teaser

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Focus your dealmaking with CRM data

Presenters

TL:DR

Cavalry Ventures has been using Affinity Analytics for four years to improve their relationship management, and dashboards provide valuable insights for decision-making.
Affinity has been essential in unlocking high-quality deal flow and efficiency, and Affinity Analytics helps to identify patterns in deal flow allowing Cavalry to unlock insights that can steer where and how to invest time.
Having team dashboards that show the number of deals shared as well as quality indicators allow for adjustments to be made to maintain high-quality indicators while encouraging strong sourcing efforts.

Teaser

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Delivering exceptional investment decisions with better data

Presenters

TL:DR

A deep dive on how Affinity can be used to make data-driven decisions while integrating with the entire VC tech stack.
By using strategic foresight methodology to define scenarios, levers and mapping value chains and deriving control points within them the team is able to make hypothesis-driven decisions and track core metrics in one place.

Teaser

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How power users integrate Affinity into their tech stack

Presenters:

TL:DR

This panel discussion highlights the power of data-driven workflows and the tools that can help streamline processes and automate tasks for maximum efficiency. By integrating collaboration tools like Slack and Teams with a CRM, teams can stay up-to-date without manual effort and gain insights about the value generated from their time. Affinity's innovative Typeform integration and API also offer a means to automatically gather data for due diligence. With the ability to ingest and enrich large volumes of data from multiple sources, Affinity provides sophisticated customers with customizable scoring models to prioritize leads based on relationship intelligence. Let's embrace the power of technology and data to revolutionize our workflows and maximize our potential for success!

Teaser:

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Founder's panel: Weathering the storm of ‘22 - ‘23

Presenters:

TL:DR

The last year for founders has truly been a period of “going back to basics”
with tactics to preserve runway and cut costs having been front and center for all.
Tactics to improve unit economics by coming up with more (creative!) free marketing strategies were shared as well as how decentralized decision-making by instilling a common north star can bolster resilience and efficiency at the same time-
One part I particularly enjoyed in this panel was the conversation around how the risk of losing trust with employees from a lack of transparency is larger than the risk of that information disseminating to competitors, investors, and the press.

“We started answering anonymous questions from employees using Slido and saw their engagement surveys go up from 3.7 to 4.2 or 4.3. Employee morale was high, and the company hit its targets, leading to no regrettable attrition.”

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Affinity's vision for the future

Presenter:

TL:DR

It’s a big focus for Affinity to enable you to utilize productivity data more efficiently, so that you can get more quickly to the right people and collect as much rich data on companies and individuals across the internet.
Affinity have met identified in the neighborhood of 800 data vendors, talked to more than 100 and partnered with dozens to get the right data for you.
Important note to this: each vendor tells a different story than another. There’s no simple truth, but certainly, these data points help you make the judgment call around who to focus on.

It’s taking millions of dollars to purchase the data [we’re integrating into Affinity]. We have 20+ engineers, data scientists and techs that help make it possible. And I think what we're realizing is that this investment gives us the ability to provide you with signal, but not always certainty.

More to keep an eye out for:

Pathfinder, Affinity’s Chrome extension can be used on LinkedIn and across the Web and now pulls in a bunch of data and broad market intelligence so you have that data on hand when browsing the internet.
Improved notes with rich content such as screenshots, tags, mentions, assings, etc. We recognize the importance of having good notes, easily accessible and manageable across the org.
Affinity integration for Salesforce. So if you’re Affinity and Salesforce user, you’re in for a treat.
Permission management - Affinity scales as you grow and part of this is ensuring that you can control who has access to what interaction, history, deals, deal information and so on. Audit logging is also a point that we’re investing into
More integrations: many already use integrtions to Slack, Typeform and Mailchimp and we’re happy to say that there’s more coming.
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EUVC | The European VC

Join us for the virtual Campfire London…