Relationships & Contacts

Two tabs cover people in Laurelin: Relationships (your view) and Contacts (the full list).

How people are modeled

A person has a single canonical record in Laurelin with:

• name, email, phone, role, linkedin_url, telegram_handle, slack_handle
• person_type — internal (Valinor team) or external (counterparty)
• contact_type — defaults to working. Used for distinguishing primary contacts from broader rosters.
• primary_flag — flags the primary contact at a company.
• notes — free-form.

A person is affiliated with one or more companies. Affiliations have:

• role_at_company (e.g., "Head of Partnerships")
• started_at, ended_at

People change jobs. When someone moves from Stripe to Bridge, you don't create a new person — you end-date their Stripe affiliation and add a Bridge one.

Relationships tab

The Relationships tab is your surface — relationships where you're involved. Smart-lists down the side:

• All Companies — every company you have any relationship with.
• Needs Outreach — yours, ball_with = us, no recent activity.
• Due Soon — based on key_dates you own.
• Ball With Us — your follow-up backlog.
• Waiting on Them — your watch-list.
• Never Contacted — companies you own with zero logged interactions.

This is the right tab for "who am I supposed to follow up with this week?" — different from Pipeline, which is the team-wide deal-flow view.

Contacts tab

The Contacts tab is the full people directory. Sub-views:

• Dashboard — total counts, signature-parser coverage, recent additions.
• My Contacts — people on projects you're on.
• By Company — grouped under each company.
• By Type — internal vs external, primary vs working contacts.

Click any person to drill into their detail.

Person detail view

Open a person, you see:

• Top card — name, role, person_type, contact_type, primary_flag, contact methods. Click to edit.
• Affiliations — companies they're (or were) at, with dates.
• Interactions — every interaction this person has been part of.
• Projects — every project they're a member or contact on.
• Notes — free-form.
• Audit trail — every change to this record (from the changelog table).

Common workflows

"I met someone new at a conference"

You don't need to do this manually. Most of the time:

1. Add their email to your next Outlook calendar invite, or send them an intro email.
2. Outlook sync ingests it.
3. If their company is in Laurelin and their domain matches, the person row is auto-created and affiliated.
4. If not, the email lands in your Sync Inbox and one click creates the company + person + interaction.

When you really need to add them by hand:

1. Contacts tab → Add Contact.
2. Name, email, role, person_type = external, affiliation = the company.

Merging duplicates

Two people with the same email arrived from different sources (e.g., Outlook + a manual Slack contact + a Notion sync). You'll spot them on the person detail page or via the by-company groupings.

1. Open the duplicate (the one you want to remove).
2. Click "Merge into existing person."
3. Pick the target (the one to keep).
4. Confirm.

What the merge does:

• Moves all interactions, project memberships, affiliations onto the target.
• Consolidates emails (extras land in the target's additional_emails).
• Backfills empty target fields from the source (so if the target was missing phone and the source had one, the target keeps it).
• Hard-deletes the source row.
• Logs the merge to changelog so you can audit later.

The same flow exists for companies — open the duplicate company, "Merge into existing", pick the target.

Editing affiliations when someone moves jobs

1. Open the person.
2. Find the old affiliation. Set ended_at to roughly today.
3. Add a new affiliation: pick the new company, set started_at.
4. Update their role if the title changed.

Don't delete the old affiliation — its presence preserves the link from old interactions to the old company. Ending it is enough.

Signature parser — the magic auto-fill

When email syncs, every external sender's signature gets parsed (deterministic regex, no AI) for phone, title, LinkedIn URL, Telegram handle. Findings auto-fill onto the matching person row, but only into empty fields.

You don't need to do anything. It happens. A few notes:

• It runs up to 3 attempts per person (capped via LAURELIN_SIGNATURE_MAX_ATTEMPTS). After that, no further parsing for that person.
• If a field comes out wrong (rare, but happens with weird sigs), edit the person record. The parser won't overwrite — it only writes to empty fields.
• People who never email you will never get parsed. That's fine.

Setting a primary contact

Open a person. Toggle primary_flag on. Use sparingly — one primary per company is the norm. Drives the "primary contact" surfaces on dashboards.

Internal vs external

The person_type is critical:

• internal — Valinor team. Doesn't get auto-routed from inbound mail; doesn't trigger Sync Inbox items.
• external — counterparty. Every interaction with an external person is logged.

If you add a team member by hand, set person_type = internal. The Team is currently: Connor, Lily, Carlyn, Bruno, Andrew, Frank, Matt.

"I want to see who I'm spending time with"

Open Contacts → My Contacts → sort by recent interactions. Or open your own person row — the Interactions section is your full log.

What lives elsewhere

• Connecting your inbox so contacts auto-fill: Sync.
• Logging an interaction manually (call, meeting note): Interactions.
• Linking a contact to a project: open the project, Members or Contacts subtab, add.