Imagine This:

You’re a Head of Platform at a Venture Capital fund. One of the (many) things on your plate is to help your portfolio companies hire exceptional talent. You’re also keen to support sales at your portcos by facilitating introductions to executives in your network. 

You know that over the years you and your firm’s partners have built solid networks - on LinkedIn, at events, and in your CRM contacts list - but how do you pinpoint and share great recommendations from across your firm’s network, not just your own, without a ton of time and energy from multiple people? 

What’s more, how do you easily share names, make intros, and track outcomes without spending hours in spreadsheets? 

Enter: GetroConnect

GetroConnect is a comprehensive network management system. But what does that actually mean?

Think of GetroConnect as a single central repository for your firm’s contacts. 

For VCs, it’s that central database of LinkedIn connections from across your firm. Your database can also include talent that expressed interest in learning about opportunities at your portcos or contacts imported from your CRM. 

This database grows automatically as your network grows thanks to continuous LinkedIn syncing and Getro’s Talent Network feature. 

Lists

Once your contact database is in place, you can use lists to share filterable subsets of your contacts with portfolio companies to support hiring or sales initiatives. 

Maybe you want to:

• Share candidate suggestions for a specific role one of your portcos is hiring for
• Showcase top engineering talent in your network
• Keep a repository of top picks for C-Suite executives
• Keep a directory of recommended business advisors 
• Share warm sales leads that meet a portco’s ideal customer profile (i.e. marketing pros at SMBs).
• Open your entire contact database to your portcos for them to filter and request intros on their own

You can do all that and more with lists. 

And the best news? With auto-updating lists, if a new contact added to your network is a fit for any of the lists you’ve already built, they’ll be added automatically. And if any existing contacts no longer fit those criteria, they’ll be automatically removed. That means you can set up and share your lists with no upkeep needed. 

All you need to do is set up your lists with specific criteria (using all our juicy filters!) and let our system sort and place your contacts appropriately as your network grows. You can even leverage AI Recommendations to receive suggestions for potential contacts to add. Think of it as putting your business intros on auto-pilot. 

But the true key to creating these shareable lists? Filters. 

Filters

GetroConnect’s extensive filters allow you to fine tune your lists to pinpoint candidates or potential leads that meet your exact desired criteria.

Our filters go beyond just title and location. They allow you to dig deep and search from across a contact’s entire work experience. Here are some of our most game changing filters (the first 3 are brand new!):

Company Funding Stage 

This filter is really a 3-in-1. 

Let’s say you’re looking for a potential hire that’s held their own in a seed stage all-hands-on-deck startup environment at some point in their career, has navigated the growing pains of when a startup turns into a rocketship of hypergrowth, and is currently at a more mature startup with firm processes in place. 

With the Company Funding Stage filter, you can easily find unicorns that meet all 3 of those criteria. Just filter for contacts in your network that:

• Have at least 2 years experience at a Seed stage startup
• Have experienced growth from Seed to Series B
• Are currently at a Series C+ company

Current company size

Working at a company post-IPO is not nearly the same as working at a seed stage startup. The days are different, the skills are different, and the processes are extremely different. Familiarity with working at a specific size company can have a huge impact on whether someone could be a great fit for a role.

Along these same lines, selling to an SMB is totally different than selling to an enterprise. When you’re looking for contacts that fit the ideal customer profile for your portcos, searching by company size is essential too (i.e. marketers at SMBs with up to 200 employees). 

Whether you’re looking for contacts that work at companies with 1-10 employees, 5,000+, or anything in between, the Current Company Size filter can help you pinpoint contacts in your network at the company size of your choice. 

And when you stack this filter alongside others, you start to get really granular, niche contact lists. 

Industry

Experience in a particular industry can be make or break for a potential hiring referral or sales lead. 

Our industry filter allows you to select from over 50 industry options, filter for contacts with experience in multiple different industries (i.e. Healthcare AND Tech), and view a contact’s depth of experience by filtering by minimum number of years experience in the industry - with options including 2 or more, 5 or more, or 10 or more years. 

Company 

Need to do some backchanneling on a potential hire or check to see if a lead could be warm? Filter contacts that were at a specific company during a set period of time so you can reach out to your contacts for references and insights. 

This is also great if you want to find candidates with experience at specific companies in your space - even more granular than industry.

Years of Experience 

Tired of doing math to count up how many years of experience someone has? Our years of experience filter does the math for you to determine your contact’s total years of professional experience. 

That said, if you’re looking for contacts with 5-10 years of experience, just add your desired range to our Years of Experience filter and GetroConnect will do the rest. 

Working at Network Companies

We believe in the power of referrals, and chances are, if a contact is already working at one of your network companies, they’re warm enough to be a great potential sales lead for one of your portcos or a fantastic hire (or both!). 

Alternatively, you might want to search specifically for contacts not currently at network companies in order to expand your search outside your network. This filter lets you do that too. 

Keyword

Want to search for, well, whatever you want? Use the keyword filter to search for specific names, functions, skills - you name it. The keyword search is AND-based, meaning anything you add to this filter will pull contacts that include all listed keywords. 

Contact of

Getro’s name literally comes from “Get Intro,” because at the end of the day, sharing filtered lists of contacts all comes down to enabling business introductions. 

With our Contact Of filter, you can share contacts that are specifically related to a person on your team. That way, portcos will know exactly who to reach out to so they can request an intro. 

Sharing Lists

Now that you’ve (1) created an organically growing database, (2) created lists with specified filters, (3) put those lists on auto-update, and (4) turned on AI recommendations, you’re ready to start sharing! 

It’s important to note that anyone you share with does not need a Getro log in. When you share a list, it’s just a shareable link that your portcos (or anyone) can access.

Want to layer on added security to your lists? You can password protect them. 

From there, when a portco accesses your shared list, they’ll see a filterable view that they can whittle down even more until they’re ready to request intros from your team (or from the list’s designated point of contact).

What’s more, they can subscribe to lists and get updates via email or Slack whenever someone new is added. This can help them keep their finger on the pulse of relevant potential intros in real time. 

For example, let’s say you’ve shared your list of top engineering talent across all your portcos. Maybe you’ve pinned it to Slack or an internal comms tool so that it’s always easily accessible. 

Portco X is looking to make their first engineering hire. They can access your list and then filter down using additional criteria relevant to them. Once they’ve narrowed down the contacts to real potential fits, they can then reach out to you for intros (or reach out directly via LinkedIn). 

Our suggestion? Create multiple ‘general’ and auto-updating lists that you’ve made accessible to your entire portfolio. Top engineering talent, top marketing talent, best business advisors, talent network signups, etc. (or even a comprehensive list of all your contacts!) Post these links somewhere accessible and leave them be - since they’ll always be up to date. 

And when a portco asks for suggestions for a specific hire, you can provide that level of direct support too. Just pull a list aligned directly with the specific job description (our AI Recommendations are a huge help here) and share just with that specific portco. 

Tracking Outcomes

What’s the point of making these intros if you’re not measuring impact? 

While important, tracking hiring outcomes can be tricky. Portcos don’t often remember to report back to their VC on who they hired after an intro has been made. 

Sure, you could scour LinkedIn or chase people down, but that’s probably not the best use of time for a busy VC or Head of Platform like yourself. 

Fortunately, when it comes to the talent intros you make to help portcos fill roles, GetroConnect can auto-track if any of your contacts actually got hired. 

That’s because we have data on your portfolio companies and your contacts in a single place. 

So when one of your contacts updates their LinkedIn profile to share that they’ve started a role at one of your portcos, that gets auto-flagged in your GetroConnect instance. 

From there, you can update that hires list by marking whether your team assisted by making an intro, thereby tracking your team’s direct impact on your portco’s hiring outcomes. 

According to our ROI calculator, each hire is worth approximately $4,700 in value, so those assisted hires can quickly add up in terms of ROI provided to your portcos. 

The best part? That data lives right in your GetroConnect instance. No in depth search or digging necessary. 

With all these tools at your disposal, it’s never been easier to make business intros at scale and drive serious ROI for your portfolio companies by leveraging the power of your network. 

And with features like LinkedIn Sync and Auto-Updating Lists, you can ‘set it and forget it’ - putting your business intros on autopilot and ensuring your suggested intros are always up to date and grow as your network grows. Ideal for a busy VC like yourself. 

Interested in learning more about GetroConnect and how it can streamline intros for your business? Request a demo here.