How should VC professionals maintain their professional networks?

Build a simple system: segment your most important relationships, schedule regular touchpoints and add value through intros, insights or check-ins without a request attached. Consistent maintenance means your network is ready and willing when you need help with a hire, deal or career move.

Most people owe a lot to a network they didn't know they were building. It might be a recruiter who remembered your name, or a founder you once helped who forwarded a role. Relationships pay off years later, in ways you can't plan for.

For platform people, the network is close to being the product. A talent lead is only as good as the candidates who return their messages. A head of platform is only as good as the buyers, experts and operators who say yes to a founder intro. And when you want your next job, the network is what gets you there.

The problem is that platform work eats the time you'd use to keep it up. You run the summit, chase the portfolio survey, prep the partner meeting, and three months go by without a word to the CFO who helped two of your companies last year. Relationships don't end when you go quiet. They just get colder, and cold relationships say no more often.

Segment your network into tiers

You can't keep up with everyone at the same depth, so don't try. Split your contacts into three tiers:

Then tag each contact by the role they play in your work. For a platform person, a handful of tags covers most of it:

• Founders in the portfolio and outside it
• Portfolio executives, especially the ones below the CEO
• Experts and operators who do office hours or advise founders
• Buyers at companies your founders want to sell to
• Peers in platform, talent and ops roles at other funds
• Candidates for portfolio roles
• Co-investors, especially the 50 or so funds your firm usually brings into a portfolio company's next round

The tags tell you who to reach when a founder asks for help. The tiers tell you how much attention each person gets.

Let your inbox keep the log

This is the part I feel strongest about. Most network systems fail in the same place: someone has to log every touch by hand. People who log or forward things manually forget. Within a month the list is wrong, then nobody trusts it, so nobody opens it.

Your job already creates touches all day. You invite an expert to office hours. You introduce a founder to a buyer. You talk to a candidate for a portfolio role. All of that happens in email and on your calendar, and they already know when you last spoke to each person. So connect your CRM to both and let the last-touch date fill itself in. Nobody should have to type it.

Type by hand only what software can't know:

• What this person cares about right now
• What they've asked you for, or helped you with
• Who they know that you might need

The last two are the part people skip, and they're what makes your next message useful. They also tend to live in your head or your WhatsApp threads. Write them down where your team can see them. A network only you can see stops working for the firm the day you're on vacation (and it leaves with you when you go).

Set a cadence you can actually keep

Here's the math for a typical setup. Say you have 20 Tier 1 contacts you touch monthly. That's 240 touches a year. Add 100 Tier 2 contacts each quarter, and that's another 400. Together, you're at roughly 640 touches a year, or about 13 a week.

That sounds like a lot until you notice most touches take two minutes. A congratulations note on a launch. A link to an article with one line about why you thought of them. A forwarded job post. Only a few each week need to be a real call or coffee, but don't drop those. I'm pretty bullish on face-to-face time sticking around for a long time. It still builds trust faster than anything you send.

The habit that works for most people I talk to is a fixed weekly block. Put 45 minutes on your calendar every Friday morning, and spend it in two passes.

1. Signals first. Who changed jobs, raised a round, launched something or started hiring this week? A real event is the best reason to write. When you haven't heard from someone, it's easy to assume nothing's going on. But what if they've been posting on LinkedIn this whole time? Keep the sources few, though. Most news alerts are noise, and if you get 200 a week you'll learn to ignore all of them.
2. Then the list. Sort by last touch and work from the top until the block ends.

If you miss a week, don't double up. Just start again the next Friday.

Give before you ask

The other half of the system is what you send. A check-in with nothing in it ("just checking in!") beats silence, but not by much. Each touch should give the other person something.

A short menu of things platform people can give:

1. An intro that helps them, not you
2. A candidate for a role they're hiring
3. Something you learned from your work, with names removed, such as a pattern from founder office hours
4. An invite to a founder dinner, a closed-door session or an event
5. A specific congratulations that shows you paid attention

Here's an example message to a Tier 2 operator:

Saw the launch of your new pricing page, the usage-based tier looks sharp. Two of our founders are working through the same move right now. No ask, but if you ever want to compare notes with them, I'd be happy to connect you.

That message gives a compliment, a bit of insight and an optional favor. It costs nothing to read and nothing to ignore.

AI tools draft notes like this pretty well. Let them draft, then read and send each one yourself. A touch that a tool sent on its own reads like one, and the whole point is that it came from you.

If you're also building a public profile, the two habits feed each other. More on that in building a personal brand in VC. And if your influence inside the firm depends on who you know outside it, see how non-investment staff build influence.

When you do need to ask

Because you've been giving, asking gets easy. Keep it short, specific and easy to decline:

We're helping one of our portfolio companies hire a VP Sales for mid-market fintech. You know that world better than anyone I know. Is there one person you'd call first? Totally fine if nobody comes to mind.

One clear ask, one reason you're asking them, one easy way out. Then close the loop afterward. Tell them what happened with the intro, even if it went nowhere. People who hear back are much more likely to help next time.

Two habits make your own intros worth more. Make every intro double opt-in: ask each side before you connect them. And after any good meeting with a buyer, ask who across your portfolio they should meet. One buyer call → one question → several intros.

What tools help manage relationship networks?

Most VC professionals can get by with a relationship CRM, such as Affinity or Attio, connected to their email and calendar. That connection matters most, because it records your last touch with each person without anyone typing it in. Manual logs go stale within weeks. Keep every contact that matters, with their tier, in one place, and review it weekly.

How I'd choose:

• Use your firm's CRM if it already holds your deal and portfolio contacts and syncs with email. Split your network across tools and you'll check neither.
• Use Airtable or Notion only if you'll keep it current by hand. Be honest with yourself here, because manual upkeep is exactly where these lists die. Check what your employment terms say about firm contact data first.
• Use LinkedIn as a signal source, not as the system. It tells you when someone changes jobs, which is a perfect reason to reach out, but it won't track your history with them.

One honest caveat: no tool I've seen does "who in my network knows X" well yet. I wish it did. For now, your tags and your memory still do that job.

How often should you reach out to your network?

Match the cadence to the relationship tier. Check in with your closest 15 to 25 contacts about once a month, your wider working network once a quarter, and everyone else once or twice a year. Contact without an ask counts the most, so most of these touches should give something.

A few practical rules help:

• Use natural triggers. A job change, a funding round, a launch or a post they wrote are all good reasons to write. You don't need to invent one.
• Keep a ratio in mind. If you've asked a contact for something, give at least two or three times before you ask again.
• Let people move tiers. Someone who becomes a frequent collaborator moves up. Someone you haven't needed in two years can move down without guilt.

You won't stay close to everyone forever, and you don't need to. What you need is the right 100 or so people to pick up when you call.