Disclaimer: Tal Bussel, our Engineer in Residence, and Uri Ar, our Chief Brand Experience Officer, wrote this post together following a burst of extreme enthusiasm from using Ply.
Have you ever wished you could just create a button that adds that one little feature you’ve always wanted to the app you’re using? That action that requires so very little of your skill, but so much of your time and focus? We definitely did. And then, luckily for us, Eden invested in Ply.
“I’ve always been a productivity buff. I love automating processes, maybe out of productive laziness,” said Eden, when we asked him how he had the foresight to invest in Ply.
“When Yaniv Tross, Zohar Sakal and Guy Schlider first showed me Ply, it seemed like magic. Once you see how you can modify any existing application, add buttons, integrate data and automagically integrate functionality, you can’t go back to living within silos.”
Bring the Walls Down
Ampliphy, our proprietary platform at Aleph, connects people, networks and software to cultivate growth for our portfolio companies and the entire Israeli high-tech ecosystem. We’ve designed the Ampliphy platform to help our companies navigate networks, access unique connections to people, knowledge, companies, and insights, and automate serendipity on a large scale.
But even with Ampliphy, we often use a variety of different tools and platforms to actualize this connection process — like Asana, Notion, Slack, Salesforce and LinkedIn — and desperately wish for better integration between them. Our team faces the challenge of constantly switching between different applications and platforms as we work.
A typical scenario at Aleph could be one of us receiving a task in Asana that would lead to looking at a person’s profile on LinkedIn, then searching for that person on Salesforce to see if we have their contact details in order to reach out to them on behalf of a portfolio company. We then copy their email address, paste it into Gmail to reach out to them and end the process by logging the email to Salesforce: a tedious series of menus, clicks and tab switching.
To smooth this workflow in the past, aside from depending on the mercy of services and tools to create the integrations we wanted — we had to use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and have our engineers write custom code to connect different platforms and services ourselves. This process was time-consuming and required maintenance. We often avoided the task and longed for a quick solution. Enter Ply.
