Case Study
FirstLook Partners is a venture fund that meets with hundreds of fund managers and founders every year. Their offshore EA couldn't keep up with the volume or the judgment their calendar required. Vela could.
Company
FirstLook Partners
Industry
Venture Capital
Headquarters
Chicago, IL
Team on Vela
2 Managing Partners
Meetings per week
20-45
Previous solution
Offshore executive assistant
Contract type
Annual
FirstLook Partners meets with 750+ fund managers and founders every year. On any given day, the managing partners are juggling 10+ back-to-back meetings - LP conversations, GP intros, founder coffees, portfolio check-ins. They had an offshore EA managing their calendars, but the role was a poor fit: two hours of actual work spread across an eight-hour day, no coverage during US evenings or weekends, and no ability to exercise judgment about which meetings matter most.
The calendar required real reasoning. A flight lands at 2 PM, but that doesn't mean a call at 2:30 works. A founder meeting in San Francisco needs to land at the right coffee shop. An LP conversation gets booked personally - never delegated. Every scheduling tool they tried fell short. Most only supported Gmail (FirstLook runs on Outlook), and the ones that worked would book over flights, ignore travel days, and treat every open slot as fair game. Calendly was dismissed immediately.
"Calendly is a little offensive. I want to talk to you, but go do some extra work? Here's a link. Go find a time. It's insulting."
The partners CC Vela on any email where a meeting needs to happen, and Vela handles the rest. No platform to log into. No links to send. Just email, exactly as they were already working.
But what sold FirstLook wasn't the workflow - it was the judgment. In one of the first weeks live, a partner landed from a cross-country flight with a meeting request waiting. Vela saw the flight, factored in travel time from the airport, suggested a nearby coffee spot at 3:30 instead of the 2:15 slot that was technically open, and sent the invite - all before the partner turned off airplane mode.
Vela looks up every contact on LinkedIn, detects their time zone, and sends options in their local time - not the partner's. It reads the context of the thread to know if a meeting is casual or urgent. When someone's calendar says "quarterly update work - no meetings," Vela respects it. When someone reschedules, Vela handles the back-and-forth without the partners ever being pulled back in.
"We couldn't find the right vendor, to be honest. We definitely wanted to do this - we just couldn't find anyone."
0
Scheduling links sent. Ever.
750+
Meetings scheduled per year across both partners
24/7
Availability across every time zone
1
Onboarding session to go live
0
Scheduling links sent. Ever.
750+
Meetings scheduled per year across both partners
24/7
Availability across every time zone
1
Onboarding session to go live
Both managing partners were live within a single onboarding session. Within minutes, the first test meeting was booked and landed directly in the partner's sent folder - no separate platform, no extra steps. FirstLook went from paying for a full-time role that required two hours of work a day to a solution at a fraction of the cost that runs around the clock.
"So I just do that in email like I normally would with an EA? I don't have to go to Vela?"
"It's been amazing."
See how Vela works - book a 15-minute demo.