July Update 2025

We’ve made a series of updates this month focused on improving how you search, manage lists, and understand relationships on Distill. These changes should make it easier to navigate the platform, collaborate with others, and prepare for the conversations that matter. Here’s what’s new:

Product updates

Invite people to your Team: There's a new ‘Team’ section on Distill where you can invite anyone you'd like! They don't need to work at the same company; we just wanted to differentiate it from your Contacts in Distill (which is who you're connected to on LinkedIn plus Gmail coming soon). Anyone you invite to your Team skips the waitlist and you can search each other's contacts. Soon you'll also see them highlighted in Intro Paths on people and company profiles.

Intro Paths Update – we changed the name of this section but more importantly are doing more to rank intro paths based on graph distance (a math-y thing based on relative connections and work history) plus we're also looking for more specific details around how people might know each other (ie worked together, investing relationship, school, articles, etc).

Natural language search: You can now type what you’re looking for, like “founders in New York,” directly into the lookup bar at the top of your Distill dashboard. We’ll automatically apply relevant filters and take you to the search interface, where you can refine as needed.

Company Search: You can now search for companies using advanced filters, just like with investor and people search. Results also highlight your connection paths into each company to help you find warm intros faster.

Table view for lists w/custom columns: Now you can add notes, status fields, or anything else you want to track right within your Distill list. It’s a flexible way to manage your workflows directly in Distill, like a lightweight CRM or built-in spreadsheet you can share with collaborators.

List descriptions: You can now add markdown-formatted descriptions to any Distill List, perfect for giving context, notes, or instructions when sharing with others. Maximum list size has also been increased to support sharing across large alumni or portfolio directories

Personal highlights on profile: we now separate out personal and professional highlights, the quality should be higher now and we also keep it to just the most interesting 7 overall.

Founder info now highlighted on startup profiles: Startup profiles now include a highlight showing who the founders are, complete with links to their Distill profiles. It’s an easy way to get quick context on the founding team and explore their backgrounds in more detail.

Upcoming priorities:

Daily digest emails: Each day, you’ll receive an email for any new external meeting that appears on your linked calendar. It includes what you have in common with the person and a fun fact so you can be a little more prepared going into the conversation.

Profile updates feed: Users will be notified when profiles they’re interested in following have notable changes, such as new jobs or published blog posts.

Allow searching from Lists: we added all ~2,300 StartX alums to a Distill list (see that here). This works surprisingly well as an auto-updating directory. We’re going to make it easier for people to create Distill accounts and do deeper searches on lists like this one. A good use case someone had was finding all the StartX alums who have robot experience (measured by company descriptions and what people post).