Airtable is a flexible database and alternative to spreadsheets for storing fields that Carta may not track like specific performance KPIs, job openings, etc. Since so many startups are already using Carta’s cap table, it’s usually pretty easy to set up the product and get a quick rundown on company ownership, number of shares, etc. Thanks to Carta and Airtable, we are now able to access all our portfolio company data in a centralized platform. Why: When putting together slides for LP day or LP letters, I hated having to scour emails or Dropbox/Box/Google Drive for individual cap tables to remember how many shares of which company we owned and when we invested.The last point can’t be overstated because it helps prevent deal members from reaching out to the same founder. Most importantly, Affinity will pull all the previous emails sent to the company’s domain. When you add a company to Affinity, the product will immediately auto-populate all the fields that matter like total funding, previous investors, location, etc. I never thought I’d say this, but once we got onto the product, I started to love adding and managing my deals. At that time, my friend David Cheng connected me with Affinity, a relationship intelligence platform. Shortly after, Salesforce announced they were going to sunset SFIQ. When I joined SignalFire, we were originally using Salesforce IQ. Uploading documents was a pain, and worse, it was impossible to figure out if any of my teammates had already reached out to the founder unless the person manually logged the email. I remember viscerally dreading the need to manually type in the company name, URL, address, state, zip code, funding information, and description of the company into Salesforce every time I created an “Account”. Salesforce was not really built for managing deals but, in my opinion, rather for sales teams. I’ve used Salesforce and I personally hated using the product. Managing your deal flow and reporting to your team what’s in the pipeline is crucial in ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. If you’re like me and don’t have someone on staff who helps you schedule, I’ve found using Calendly to be the perfect way for founders or VCs to automatically suggest multiple available time slots, versus having to manually comb for times in our calendars.
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