Folk is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software designed to cater to various relationship management needs across multiple sectors among them VCs and startups.

1. Diverse Use Cases : Folk is designed for multiple applications, including sales, recruiting, fundraising, partnerships, investing, event organization, and community building.
2. Contact Sync : The platform allows users to synchronize contacts and interactions from various sources, making it easy to consolidate and manage contact information in one place.
3. Pipeline Management : Folk offers tools for collaborative pipeline management to close more deals efficiently. This feature is beneficial for sales teams and organizations that manage multiple leads and opportunities.
4. Email Campaigns and Sequences : The software enables users to generate emails with AI, personalize them at scale, launch sequences, and track results. This is particularly useful for marketing campaigns and bulk communication.
5. Chrome Extension : Folk features a Chrome extension, facilitating the import of contact profiles from various online sources with a single click.
6. Customization and Segmentation : Users can segment and categorize contacts as needed, aiding in targeted communication and relationship management.
7. Integrations : Folk supports integration with over 6,000 tools, including major CRM platforms, making it adaptable to various business processes and workflows.
8. Testimonials and User Feedback : The website showcases testimonials from various users, including founders, CEOs, marketing managers, and portfolio managers, highlighting Folk's versatility and ease of use.
9. Use Case Specific Features : Folk tailors its functionalities to specific use cases like managing sales, organizing events, or running fundraising campaigns, making it a versatile tool for different business needs.
10. Data-Driven Decision Making : The platform emphasizes the use of analytics and reports to facilitate data-backed decisions, although this feature is marked as 'coming soon.'
11. Security and Privacy : Folk ensures user data security and complies with privacy policies, although detailed information about their security measures isn't prominently displayed.
12. Educational Resources : Folk offers tutorials and a blog, providing users with resources to maximize the platform's use and stay updated on CRM best practices.

In conclusion, Folk presents itself as a comprehensive CRM solution adaptable to various business needs. Its strengths lie in contact management, pipeline management, email campaign functionalities, and integrations with a wide range of tools. While it seems to cater well to diverse sectors, prospective users might need to explore further or contact Folk for detailed information on pricing, security specifics, and customization capabilities. Timestamps of Video Interview00:00 Intro00:28 What is folk?01:36 Stand-out features?02:52 Main UI03:37 Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram Import04:18 Mail and Calendar Integration05:12 Customizing Fields05:28 Enrich Contact Cards06:30 Mail Automation07:13 Campaign Analytics08:34 Top 4 features summary09:00 Who uses folk?10:01 Zapier Integration10:45 Pricing11:10 folk's Founding Story13: 05 State of the SaaS Industry15:03 Unicorpses and Consolidation17:06 Outro AI Transcript of Video Interview "Hello, welcome to Stack Genius, the podcast for data-driven investment professionals. My name is Sylvain. I'm greeting you from Berlin today and warm greetings go out wherever you are in the world right now. I'm also welcoming Simo from Folk, who's joining us from Paris today, I think. Is it true? Absolutely. Thank you, Sylvain, for having me. Very excited to have this discussion with you. Very good. Yeah, I know that you were on a team outing yesterday, so even more kudos that you have this conversation with us today. Thank you. So I was trying to describe what FOLK is. And, you know, in my view, it's not a fully specialized CRM for VCs and PEs, but it's also not a generalist. So it's neither a pipe drive nor an affinity. Is that fair at all? Would you share that view? That's interesting. Actually, the way we envision ourselves and the vision for which we are building is that we actually are a tool for relationships. What we focus on is relationship and we are specialized on relationship. And this is one of the reasons that make us a really good fit for VCs. and investors in general, in the sense that it's a relationship-driven job. And I'd say that we aim to have the most, I'd say, customizable, collaborative, and easy-to-use platform for people and teams that aim to manage relationships to do their job. Okay, that's helpful. And so what is special about your solution that people should really remember when they hear about Folk? Yeah, absolutely. Well, basically, when we discussed with people that manage relationships to do their job, and especially investors, we realized that the relationships are about data, about both qualitative and quantitative data. And these people were feeling they were spending a lot of time just manually updating a CRM, moving from one tool to another. And this wasn't really making them better off their job. This was making them feel they were losing time in unnecessary tasks. So what we have built is the only CRM that's actually connected to all the tools that you already use. It's connected to your LinkedIn, to your Twitter, to your Instagram, to your Gmail, to your Outlook, to Save Navigator in seamless ways. So you have all the data, both qualitative and quantitative, in order to run your process smoothly and efficiently for you and for your team. It sounds awesome. I mean, this... I want to say, with hopefully not doing you injustice, I hear similar things from other solutions. So I would really love to maybe look at it together and understand how that works. Can you show us the tool a little bit? My pleasure. I'll try to do a short tour and focus on the main, I'd say, benefits of the product. Awesome. Are you able to view my screen now? Okay, perfect. Well, welcome everyone on Folk. When you land on Folk, you land basically on a workspace. So this is the Acme workspace. It's like a collaborative hub for you and your team. And the base you need on Folk when you land is like groups, as you can see them on the left sidebar, that are basic categories made up of contacts that helps you categorize contacts the way you want. For a VC, it would be about creating LPs, founders, portfolio companies, and so on. And it helps map your ecosystem. In this group, you can create as many contacts as you want. And we want to make this fast, so you don't spend time just updating your CRM manually. One of the most efficient features in that sense is just to go on any profile. For example, on LinkedIn, let's say. Click on this profile, basically. use my Chrome extension, and in one click, I can add this person to the right group with all its databases. I can do it in bulk also from LinkedIn, from a search, and from many other tools, like Instagram, like TikTok, like Twitter, like Gmail, and so on. On top of that, we are connected to your emails, to your calendar, and to your contact hub, be it on Google Contact or Outlook. So whenever you meet or discuss with someone, the person is imported in real time into Folk. And you can add them, basically, in one click. And just search for the person that you just met and add them to the right group. For example, it's a founder or whatever. You can also connect to whatever integration. I won't cover that in detail or import any file, obviously. Basically, we make importing the data into Folk super easy. Then it's like a basic database where you can add as many fields as you want, as you might be using like Notion or Airtable or even Excel. And we make it slightly more intelligent by calculating some fields for you, like strongest connection, like total interaction, or last interaction, in order to give you some, let's say, relationship intelligence. on this database you can basically filter by whatever you want sort by whatever you want choose the column that you want to show and hide it's really i'd say customizable in the sense that you can make it yours and we give you also some really powerful actions um first you can enrich the contact in order to find their email address if you don't have them we use a bunch of enrichment providers and this is really helpful for example to reach out to new founders that you discovered on LinkedIn and you don't have the email address. Can I double click on that for a second when you said enrichment providers? So you would need to have your subscription with those enrichment providers and then connect it via token or is it included or how does it work? So basically, this is a really good question. It's a design principle that we have. We don't want people to have to do complex stuff. We want them to be able to do all action in one click on folks. So we are connected with the enrichment provider. We do the hard job on the back end, building a waterfall to combine multiple enrichment providers to provide you with the best data. And you just click, and we will find the email for you, basically. You don't have to do anything. Thanks. On top of that, we also provide an emailing tool directly embedded into the CRM. So I just need to click on Message All. And what's quite interesting here is that I can send one-off message or send sequences, basically, separated by time, let's say, conditions, and choose who would be the sender and make these emails super, I'd say, personalized by including variables. all the variables I want from my database. What's super, I'd say, efficient and that I use a lot is simply creating some template for me. And this template would include these variables so all messages look super personalized. This helps for reaching out to founders for a first meeting, for inviting them to an event, whatever it is. What's quite interesting here is that after sending, you'll get the list of all the campaigns that you have sent and the details about the analytics. Who read, who replied, who clicked, who didn't click, with the history of what happened precisely for this contact. And then after sending a campaign, if you need to track all these contacts into a pipeline, it's really easy. Basically, you can create a pipeline and customize them the way you want, like in terms of columns and colors or whatever, and move them easily from one step to another. And just make the process adapted to the way you work as a firm. Sure. And if you need more information, basically, you can simply click on a contact, open the contact profile. On the left, we have the basic data that we had on the table. And on the right, some deeper data, all the interaction that has been synchronized automatically from emails, from calendar, and the option to add new ones. notes that helps take notes on a contact or mention people of your team after a meeting and reminders in order to remind yourself to reach out to someone after a center time you will be informed by email and in up in the notification section and this helps you out for example like reach out to a founder six six months from now if he didn't reply I kept it short, but I'd say these are like the four main blocks we have in the software. Import contact data from wherever you want and reach it in order to find additional information. Send them emails or email campaigns if you need, like for whatever workflow you might have with this contact and just manage them in a pipeline very easily. I like it. I also like the flexibility. It looks like you can customize a lot. I know a few other companies, for example, I think does a similarly good job at that. So I really like what you do. So but I was listening in the beginning when you said the integrations are also a strength of yours. So maybe first, do you roughly know how many of your customers are investment professionals? Is it like 10 percent, 50 percent or 70 percent? Yeah, I'd say roughly between 20 and 25 percent. Okay. And do you have any visibility how they typically integrate upstream and downstream? So, for example, investors often have tools like, I don't know, landscape or gravity or those type of things that help them identify companies. And then once they invest, they need to do due diligence and they need to do portfolio management. So they have downstream systems as well. Do you already have pre-existing integrations or experiences with these things? Absolutely. So what we do recommend in that case is basically to leverage or make our Zapier integration. So as you know, making Zapier like library of integration that offers more than 6,000 for Zapier different integration and use that data in order to import, companies into your CRM system into folk whenever like a company match your criteria as a firm. And then you can manage it in a pipeline properly. Okay, understood. Really cool. And how does pricing work conceptually? Is it per seat or is there a usage element? How does it conceptually work? Absolutely. So, yeah, we wanted to keep pricing super simple and straight to the point. And so per seat pricing is the simplest, I'd say, way to understand it. We start at like $24 per seat per month. So we are way more, I'd say, competitive than... like Affinity, for example, that cost thousands of dollars. Okay, that's very cool. Well, then I'm also curious about hearing your story. So when did you found Folk and why? So how did this come to be? Give us the folklore. I will give you the folklore, jumping back on stopping the sharing screen. When we started Folk a bit more than three years ago, starting from a simple starting point, CRM is among the largest software category, but with one of the lowest NPS. When you talk with the people that use CRM for their day-to-day job, they'd just be super frustrated. They feel they are spending time updating the CRM. They lose the data. It's not usable. Whenever they need to change something, they need to call an agency to do it and spend tens of thousands of dollars. This isn't the way we expect to use software today. And at the same time, we were convinced that CRM turned out to be so successful as a category because people use them for their relationships. And relationships are like what drives business. Drive business for like selling to clients, investing in founders, recruiting candidates, whatever. So we just wanted a tool that would be up to this mission, empowering people to build better relationships. And so we started on that mission three years ago. We know that CRM is a complex product and we wanted to put a lot of care and a lot of craft into it. We raised funds with Axel and with founders from companies we admire, like the founders of Dropbox, of Webflow, of Behance, of Alain, of Conto, of Pitch.com, some great product companies. And yeah, we have more than 100,000 users now. We have been nominated Product of the Year on Product 10. So yeah. The journey is going well and couldn't be more happy to bring a small part in the way people are managing their relationships. i'm super happy to hear that man i'm always uh um fascinated by stories like this and you know kudos if if it works well um i mean maybe to take a bigger lens for a second what's your view on the state of the industry so if you if you listen to for example um 20 vc harry stabbings lately had a conversation online where they spoke about with soster that SaaS, you know, might the first time in history might be challenged a little bit because, you know, it has been growing beyond GDP all the time and now multiples are not there anymore. So what's your view of the state of the industry at all? That's a good question. Well, to be honest, we are here for the long run and we build for the long run with healthy unit economics. We are not here about raising the next mega round. That's not what excites us internally. We are more excited about building a product people will really love, that will make us proud, where we will feel the craft and that will support the company with healthy economics that won't rely on like external funding and So I'd say that we are just, we keep the heads down, building something people love, and not caring that much about the state of the current VC funding market, because that's not what drives us, basically. I think it's very healthy. And, you know, we were in an unhealthy state where, you know, all the elevated valuations and big rounds in the last few years. Now we're in an age of down rounds and downsizing of companies, right? And also, I think we will see quite some unicorpses in the next few months and maybe even in the next 12 months or so. Anyway, I was just curious to hear your opinion. Another comment I might have is that I think it's fascinating how fragmented industry the software industry that services venture capital still is there's hundreds and hundreds of solutions out there and many of them just have maybe 50 clients or 100 clients right so it's just so many out there so it's ripe for consolidation at some point i think Absolutely. And I do think there is a real premium for like experiences that are truly built with a lot of care. If you think about it, like the CRM market in general and for VCs is super fragmented and is a very large market. And I think that there is room for multiple winners, basically. It's not a one-size-fits-all market, one-winner-takes-all market. But that being said, I truly believe that quality, over time, wins. And we overinvest in making something super qualitative. Because these are like at the end of the day, industry where word of mouth matters a lot when it comes to productivity. And the best way to, let's say, accelerate word of mouth is to have a very high NPS. Just think about ChatGPT, for example, the way they have their growth has been so explosive. is mainly due to word of mouth, like people were talking about it because they love the product. So that's our biggest focus, like our users love us, we want to make them and we make everything so they love us even more. So, well, I do hope that today's conversation has at least helped in people loving folk and, you know, if they're interested, then they should get in touch with you guys. So, i thank you a lot for spending time with us today and i'm really looking forward to connecting next time i'm in paris i will let you know my pleasure thank you sylvan for having me thank you."