Ray Zhou, CEO of Affinity, believes every opportunity begins with a relationship—and knows that business networks become unwieldy and harder to leverage as they grow larger. In response, he co-founded Affinity, whose eponymous CRM captures and organizes “data exhaust” from emails and calendars, and combines it with other datasets to provide the “relationship intelligence” needed by decision-makers in venture capital, investment banking, private equity, and consulting: industries where relationship-building is foundational to dealmaking. A native of the Bay Area (USA), Ray met Affinity’s co-founder, Shubham Goel, at Stanford, where they were studying computer science. Their goal is to bring relationship intelligence to the world at large.