Understanding how VCs can optimize portfolio support

An earlier version of this article appeared in Forbes. It has been expanded with Affinity benchmark data and customer examples.

There are four parts to a venture capitalist's job: finding companies, picking winners, winning deals, and adding value. The fourth deserves more attention than it gets, and most firms have more to give than they use. Affinity's 2026 VC benchmark data, drawn from almost 3,000 venture firms, shows the median firm turns only 38% of its tracked relationships into introductions. For most firms, over half the network never produces a single warm intro.

Portfolio support is every way an investor helps a portfolio company succeed beyond writing the check. In practice it usually means:

• Business development: Helping close early customers, large deals, or important partnerships.
• Recruiting: Sourcing executives, then interviewing and convincing strong candidates to join.
• Fundraising: Advising on the next round and making introductions to investors in the firm's network.
• Advice: Sharing a 10,000-foot view that founders and management teams on the ground may miss.
• Sounding board: Being someone to call in moments of uncertainty or transition.

With capital deployment slowing across the industry, firms need ways to support companies that don't depend on writing more checks. Below are the three levers VCs have, how to put each one into practice, and how to measure whether it's working.

The tools VCs have to create value

Beyond capital, VCs rely on three levers to make a real difference in a company's growth: their network, their brand, and their market data.

1. The network effect

The most important tool a VC has is their network and the ability to make introductions. Whether it's for business development, recruiting, or fundraising, a warm intro is the most direct way an investor can add value.

This holds even for advice. An investor doesn't need to be an expert in every function. They need to know who is: a strong design leader to advise on design, or a sales leader to pressure-test go-to-market. The asset is knowing who at your firm knows whom.

The gap between firms is wide. In Affinity's 2026 benchmark data, the median VC firm makes 20 introductions per user per month. The bottom quarter makes 10 and the top quarter makes 36, roughly a 4x spread.

The network is also more concentrated than most firms realize. One person holds a median 29% of a firm's strong relationships, and the top three hold 65%. If portco intros only come from the board member's own contacts, the firm is drawing on a fraction of what it has.

Put it into practice. Most firms make intros reactively, when a founder asks or a partner remembers a name. Firms that do this well run it as a process:

1. Ask for intro needs on a schedule. Collect each portco's target customers, partners, and open roles at onboarding and at every check-in, not only when a founder emails.
2. Map the network before you reply. Check who across the whole firm knows the target and how recently they've been in touch, not just whoever is on the board.
3. Log every intro and its outcome. If you don't record intros, you can't tell a founder, a partner, or an LP what your support actually delivered.

MassMutual Ventures (MMV), a multistage firm with 70+ portfolio companies, built its platform program around this. Before, investors were doing portfolio support "off the side of their desk" with no consistent way to route intros. Head of Platform Samantha Santaniello-Lawrence now tracks talent placements, commercial and partner introductions, and board seat placements in one CRM. In one case, a portco prospecting a specific company saw that MMV already had a connection there, and MMV made the intro.

2. Brand and community

A firm with a strong brand helps its portfolio companies indirectly, through credibility.

This shows up most in hiring. Candidates find roles on well-known firms' job boards, or join a company partly because of who funded it.

Communities are also becoming a bigger part of platform work. Founders, and often their executives, benefit from a peer group they can compare notes with. That might be an event that brings "sister" portfolio companies together to see how others solved the same problem and to benchmark their metrics. It's also more basic than that. Building a company is lonely, and in a down market it's easy for the pressure to get to you. Having peers to lean on helps.

Put it into practice. Communities need to be built on purpose, and they take sustained effort. A few patterns make that effort pay off:

• Group by role, not just by company. A CFO roundtable or a heads-of-sales channel gets more candid than an all-portfolio event.
• Pick a cadence you can keep. A quarterly dinner that happens beats a monthly series that fades out by month three.
• Bring something to the room. Peer benchmarks, an operator speaker, or a specific problem to work through give people a reason to show up.

3. A data resource

VCs can also add value through the data and benchmarks they share. Founders look for data when they make big decisions or try to understand their own trajectory. For example, benchmarks help a founder see what "good" looks like before a raise or an M&A process.

Which metric you look at matters as much as the number. Affinity's own VC data shows why. Email volume per user barely differs between firms: the top quarter sends about twice what the bottom quarter does (1,580 versus 750 a month). Introductions per user vary about 4x. A founder who benchmarks on the wrong metric draws the wrong conclusion, and their investors are often best placed to point them to the one that matters.

Investors with a good read on market data quickly become a go-to resource. That saves founders time, and it builds trust between board meetings.

Put it into practice. Raw data rarely helps on its own. Share the benchmark with the context the founder needs: the stage, geography, and sample behind it, what it leaves out, and what you'd do with it in their position.

Technologies that strengthen portfolio support

The right tools make portfolio support repeatable. They take the manual work out of intros, data collection, and events, so a small platform team can support more companies without dropping any.

1. A CRM that maps your firm's network

Introductions are a VC's most valuable form of support, so the firm's network needs to be tracked in a structured, ongoing way. In practice, that means a CRM that captures email and calendar activity automatically and maps every relationship across the team, with no manual data entry.

That frees investors to spend time building relationships and meeting new people who could become the next deal or the next intro for a portco.

Relationship intelligence builds on that foundation. It uses AI to score how strong each connection actually is, so you can choose the warm path most likely to get a response. LinkedIn still has a place: first-, second-, and third-degree connections are a useful fallback when the firm's own network comes up short.

2. Datasets and benchmarks

Access to datasets and benchmarks can be valuable to portfolio companies. For compensation, data from recruiting firms or comp benchmarking tools helps founders make offers that match the market.

Benchmarks vary by stage, role, and geography, and they often leave out equity. That's where a VC can help founders read the numbers in context.

3. Communications and data collection

Founders have little time for investor requests. Tools that simplify portfolio data collection make reporting faster for both sides. Agree on the handful of KPIs that matter most so requests stay light, and treat reporting as a two-way street: send founders feedback, benchmarks, or analysis in return.

Measuring portfolio support

What a firm doesn't measure, it can't improve or explain to LPs. MMV sets an annual goal for its platform team: portfolio companies should close meaningful annual recurring revenue (ARR) through introductions the team makes. Santaniello-Lawrence tracks progress in Affinity and reports the closed contracts back to the firm's investors at year end.

MMV pairs that goal with a fixed cadence: a 30-minute meeting with every portfolio company every 90 days. Each check-in is a chance to collect new intro requests and log what earlier intros produced.

A practical starting set of measures:

• Intros made, by portco and by type (customer, partner, talent, investor).
• Intro outcomes: meetings taken, deals closed, hires made, and revenue where you can attribute it.
• Coverage: which portcos haven't had a check-in or an intro in the last quarter.
• Support by type per company: tag each company with the support it has received, so you can see where to invest more time.

For a reference point, Affinity's 2026 data puts network activation at a median of 38%, with the top quarter above 63%. Network activation is the share of a firm's tracked relationships that produce an introduction, and it separates firms more than any other metric in the benchmark.

Where to start

Portfolio support is becoming a real differentiator for VC firms. Firms that run it with the same rigor as sourcing and investing deepen founder relationships, strengthen their brand, and open doors that speed up growth. If you're building or rebuilding your program, start here:

1. Collect intro needs from every portco at onboarding, then refresh them on a fixed cadence.
2. Put the firm's whole network in one place, so anyone can see who knows whom before replying to a request.
3. Log every intro and its outcome.
4. Pick one or two measures that tie support to results, such as revenue from intros or hires placed, and report them each year.
5. Launch one role-based peer group and run it on a cadence you can sustain.

For a deeper look at structuring a platform program, see The VC's portfolio support guide.