Relationships are the Atomic Unit of Deal Flow (w/ Ken Fine, CEO of Affinity)
Devin Mathews sits down with Ken Fine, CEO of Affinity, to discuss how relationship intelligence and AI are transforming deal sourcing in private capital. They explore why private equity should adopt venture capital's relationship-first sourcing model, how ambient data capture eliminates manual CRM entry, and why custom in-house AI builds fail compared to dedicated systems of record.
- Junior private equity associates and VPs routinely burn two to three hours every Monday manually logging meetings, notes, and pipeline updates into legacy systems. Read →
- Ken Fine argues that standard enterprise CRMs fail private capital because manual data entry starves the software of real relationship context. Read →
- Ken Fine, CEO of Affinity, argues that the true atomic unit of value in private dealmaking is the relationship graph, not process speed or manual CRM data entry. Read →
- Devin Mathews published a 10,000-word piece in March titled "The Ghost of Software Future" arguing enterprise software will domesticate AI, not collapse under it. Read →
- Venture capital firms source deals through senior partners who build direct, multi-year relationships with founders and serial operators. Read →