Laurelin overview

Laurelin is the CRM. It tracks every company we're talking to, every person at those companies, every project we run, and every interaction (email, call, meeting, note, telegram, Slack) between them.

This guide is the mental model: the four nouns, the tabs, and how to find anything.

The four nouns

Everything in Laurelin reduces to four kinds of record:

       Company  ◀── affiliation ──▶  Person
          ▲                             ▲
          │ company_id                  │ participants
          │ (required)                  │ (one or more)
          └─────── Interaction ─────────┘
                       │
                       │ project_id (optional)
                       ▼
                    Project ──▶ linked to companies, people, key dates

• Company — an external organization. Bridge, Tempo, Stripe, Morpho.
• Person — an individual. Has a person_type: internal (a Valinor team member) or external (a counterparty contact). Linked to companies via affiliations (who they work for, in what role, since when).
• Project — a unit of work. Could be a deal (Underdog Diligence), a fund (OATFI-001), a product (Laurelin itself is a project), biz dev, research, internal infrastructure work — 12 types in total.
• Interaction — something that happened. An email arrived, a call happened, a meeting was logged. Has a date, a company, optionally a project, any number of participating people, a direction (inbound / outbound / mutual / internal), and a source (outlook / slack / telegram / notion / manual).

Everything else — milestones, links, status updates, key dates — hangs off these four.

The tabs

The sidebar on the left has the primary tabs. The "More" dropdown on the right has the rest.

Primary (sidebar)

• User Page — your personalised landing.
• Project Map — what projects we're working on, viewed by time and importance / impact. Visual.
• Pipeline — the deal-flow view. Companies grouped by stage, filtered by owner, category, ball_with. The right view for "where do we stand on every conversation?"
• Relationships — company interactions, filterable by POC, timing, and company importance. Surfaces the relationship grid and smart-lists for "Needs Outreach", "Due Soon", "Waiting on Them", "Never Contacted".
• Valinor Priorities — the priorities focus view. What the team is working on this period, ranked. Used for weekly/monthly planning.
• Intake — make sure interactions are logged to the correct (or new) company. Routes unmapped items to a review queue.

More (dropdown)

• Companies — the full companies list with filters and search. Add a new company here.
• Projects — the projects list. Add a new project, drill into status updates, milestones, links, members.
• Contacts — the people list. Add a contact, edit affiliations, merge duplicates.
• Interactions — the interaction log (a.k.a. timeline). Filter by company, type, person, source.
• Calendar — interactions and key dates on a calendar.
• Sync — connect Outlook / Slack / Telegram / Notion. Triage the Sync Inbox. Manage skip rules and channel mappings.
• Laurelin Management — internal request queue and component health. Mostly for engineering.

Where to start

If you're new to the system, in this order:

1. Connect at least your inbox. Without sync, Laurelin only knows what you type. With sync, most interactions auto-log.
2. Open the User Page. See what the system is surfacing.
3. Find your name in Contacts. If you're not there, message Connor.
4. Pick one company you actively work with. Open it. Check its stage, owner, ball_with. Edit anything that's stale.
5. File a status update on one of your projects. Just one. Takes 60 seconds.

How interactions flow in

The path for an external email arriving in your @valinordigital.com inbox:

1. The Outlook adapter polls Microsoft Graph every few minutes for new mail.
2. The auto-router classifies the sender.
3. If the sender's domain is on a known company's email_domains, the email becomes an interaction directly. No clicking required.
4. If the sender is unknown, the email lands in your Sync Inbox for review. You approve into an existing company, approve into a new company (one click creates company + person + interaction), or dismiss.
5. Skip rules cover anything you never want to see (newsletters, vendor noise).

Slack and Telegram work the same way, with connector-specific quirks documented in the Sync guide.

What Laurelin doesn't do

• It doesn't send mail or post to Slack. Read-only by design. No connector has the write scope.
• It isn't your primary inbox. It logs interactions so future-you can find them; it doesn't replace your email client.
• It isn't a workflow tool. No assignable tasks, no kanban. Projects have a next_step and a blocker; that's deliberate. We move work in our heads and in Slack, and use Laurelin to keep the record.
• It isn't connected to portfolio P&L. The Portfolio Reports app is separate.

When in doubt

• "Where do I log this thing that just happened?" → Interactions
• "How does this deal look?" → Pipeline
• "I want to file a weekly update on Project X" → Projects
• "Why isn't this email showing up in Laurelin?" → Sync
• "Someone sent me an email and I never replied" → Lost threads
• "Two people with the same name" → Contacts → merging