A venture agent reading Affinity can summarize a founder's network, score the warm path, and propose a next move. The risk is that the summary lives in chat and the partner approves it from memory. Dock fixes that. The agent writes a relationship brief into a Dock row, attaches the Affinity contact pointer, and waits for a named partner to sign off before the brief reaches the investment memo. The audit trail survives fund cycles, LP diligence, and staff turnover.
Affinity + Carta stay the system of record for the raw data. Dock is the system of record for what the AGENT INTERPRETS. Each Dock row carries a pointer back to the platform record, agent identity, decision, reviewer, and timestamp. The agent re-fetches platform data via fresh API reads when it needs current state.
Surface: Relationship Brief queue
| Founder | Affinity contact | Agent draft | Strongest path | Partner sign-off | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lin Park, Orbital Health | affinity://person/8821 | Two warm intros via Dr. Chen (8 emails, 90d). Stage: seed close in 3w. | Chen -> Park, score 0.82 | Priya R., 2026-05-29 14:02 | Take intro call |
| Sam Diaz, Verge Robotics | affinity://person/9104 | No first-degree path. Closest is alum network via R. Tate, last touch 14mo. | Tate -> Diaz, score 0.31 | Marcus L., 2026-05-29 16:40 | Cold outreach, defer |
| Ana Vu, Strata Bio | affinity://person/9237 | Co-investor signal: two portfolio CEOs replied within 48h to Ana in Q1. | Portfolio -> Vu, score 0.71 | Priya R., 2026-05-30 09:11 | Schedule partner meet |
Each row stores the agent identity, the prompt version, the Affinity pointer, and the human reviewer. The brief is never the final word. It is a draft a partner accepts, edits, or rejects with one click, the way Cowork makes review explicit.
Workflow: Affinity contact to partner sign-off
A new founder enters the pipeline. Affinity logs the first email. The agent picks up the contact ID, re-reads the last 90 days of interaction data via Affinity's API, and drafts three things into a Dock row: a one-paragraph relationship brief, a ranked list of intro paths, and a recommended next action. The row enters the Relationship Brief queue assigned to the deal lead. The partner opens Dock, reads the brief, checks the pointer back to the Affinity record, and signs off, edits, or rejects. On sign-off, Dock pushes a structured note back to the Affinity contact and stamps the memo draft with the reviewer name. If the partner edits, the diff is stored against the original agent draft so the next training pass can see where humans corrected the model.
Why it matters
LPs ask who decided. Auditors ask when. Junior partners ask why a deal was passed. A summary in chat cannot answer any of those. A Dock row with a named reviewer, a timestamp, and an Affinity pointer can. This is the same principle behind every agent identity commitment we make: the agent acts, the human approves, and the record persists. Firms running large deal volume report relationship data as their core competitive asset, and the NVCA Yearbook documents $1.21 trillion under management as of 2023, much of it allocated on the strength of warm-path judgment.
Read the investor pillar for the full surface set.
FAQ
Does Dock replace Affinity? No. Affinity remains the relationship graph and contact system of record. Dock holds the agent's interpretation of that graph and the reviewer who approved it.
Can the agent push back into Affinity? Yes, as structured notes on the contact record. The note includes the Dock row ID so anyone reading Affinity can trace the claim back to the reviewer.
Who can sign off on a relationship brief? Whichever partner the deal lead routes the row to. The Dock row records the reviewer name, not a service account, so no shared credentials hide the decision.
How does this connect to research workflows? Diligence briefs share the same pattern. See the research workspace for the parallel surface for technical, market, and reference-call interpretation.
