Below is a Q&A session with Ablorde Ashigbi, CEO at 4Degrees. Ablorde is a former investor and consultant, who saw first hand how critical relationship management was for private market participants. He and his co-founder decided to apply that experience to build software to radically improve how private market funds and banks manage their workflows and relationships.
Q: Please share a brief overview of your company? When was 4Degrees established and what are your goals? Who are the brains behind the company?
4Degrees was founded in 2017 with the simple idea that a team’s relationship network was their most important professional asset, and yet there was essentially no good technology to help them harness that. This was particularly true of a set of industries my co-founder and I had direct experience with – venture capital, private equity, and M&A. So we left those industries with the goal of helping those teams extract more value out of their professional networks, while drastically simplifying the day to day workflows performed by most investment professionals.
Q: What industries do you serve?
The 4Degrees platform helps many private market and deal-driven industries do their best work, including:
- Venture Capital – As a CRM to help VC’s track deals and their portfolio companies in a collaborative environment.
- Private Equity – Similar to venture, our CRM helps private equity firms drive proprietary deal flow with less data entry.
- Mergers & Acquisitions + Investment Banking – Helping M&A firms and investment banks navigate their complex transactions without relying on spreadsheets.
- Consulting – Consulting businesses rely on staying up to speed on the industries they specialize in, as well as the customers they serve – both of which are streamlined when they choose 4Degrees.
- Commercial Real Estate – The 4Degrees commercial real estate CRM helps to broker deals & connections without spending time on manual data entry.
Q: Tell us more about 4Degrees. What are the key features and capabilities? How does it compare to other financial CRM platforms available?
Our focus is to free up time spent doing manual tasks, and help your network work for you. To do that, we eliminate the tedious tasks of data entry about your relationship network + deals, and provide automation to help you best engage with those people and companies in service of your goals.
To that end, some of the key features include:
- Automatically syncing all your communications with companies and relationships, so you always have the context of your team’s prior interactions as you engage.
- Integrating with a number of third-party services to eliminate data entry about deals and contacts, so you spend more time building relationships and closing deals.
- Helping teams instantly identify which team members have the best relationship with a targeted person or company, which helps power everything from deal sourcing to helping portfolio companies get connected to customers or talent.
- Searching the world for relevant information about people and companies, which helps you build relationships with your deal sourcing network – and pick up signals about companies in your network that may be a good fit for you.
Our customers choose 4Degrees vs. other systems for two reasons:
- How much we streamline their core workflows. Part of that is driven by the amount of automated data entry performed by our product. Part of that is our understanding of where our customers do their work – in their inboxes, on their phones – and building software that works well in those environments. And part of that is an intuitive, modern interface that is honestly rare in this industry.
- How differently we treat relationships vs. most other systems. In a traditional CRM, contacts are treated as a 2nd or 3rd class citizens. This makes some sense in transactional worlds – but not in the relationship-driven industries we serve. So our focus on relationships – automatic enrichment, categorization, and searching the world for relevant events – is an entirely different experience that’s aligned with their worldview.
Q: What are some of the best use cases for 4Degrees?
One of the most common use cases for 4Degrees is around streamlining deal flow management. Looking at an example from KB Partners: one of the things we’ve heard from them is that we save them a lot of time in how they track, organize, and make decisions about potential investments. That functionality is also used by our customers to track their fundraising progress with Limited Partners, as well as portfolio company metrics.
Where we really shine is how we track and enrich your team’s relationship network, which unlocks a number of other critical use cases. Some examples:
- Deal-sourcing: Our relationship strength detection helps you instantly figure out if and how well a team is connected to an interesting company. We pick up news and alerts about those people and companies to suggest ways to engage. We also enable you to set recurring reminders with deal sources to ensure the relationship remains strong.
- Due diligence: Finding experts in your network with deep knowledge of specific industries, business models, or functional areas that you can leverage to get to conviction more rapidly.
- Portfolio support: We uncover connection paths into prospective customers for your portfolio companies, and our categorization enables you to find potential hires in specific functional areas in your network.
Q: What’s next for 4Degrees?
Our work remains the same – to be the premier solution for participants in the private markets to get the most out of their relationship network, and eliminate as much data entry as possible.
To that end, we’re pursuing more data partnerships to pull in more information and reduce manual work for our customers. We’re investing heavily in developing automated workflows and conditional logic in our product to save time. And we’re working to enable more ways a firm can share their network (and get others to share their networks back) outside of the four walls of the firm.
We’re lucky to have a close and deep partnership with our customers, and we’re constantly looking to them for what we should build next – and we’ll continue doing that well into the future!
