Jacob Bank sold his previous company to Google seven years ago and is about to start a new one with a focus on automation.
Timeful was a smart scheduling app that helped users make better use of their time. After selling up to the tech giant, Bank joined their ranks and worked on integrations of core Timeful technology into Gmail and Calendar, as well as other products.
In July of 2021, Bank parted ways with Google to found Relay, which is a product that sits somewhere in the middle of Asana and Zapier. A number of product, design, and engineering personnel from the Gmail and Google Calendar development team have been hired by him.
According to Bank, the goal is to combine the time saving automations of Zapier with the accountability of Asana.
The image is from Relay.
There is no shortage of automation tools out there, and Zapier is perhaps the most well-known of them all. It is this desire to reduce tedious, repetitive tasks that Relay is looking to take advantage of, with specific scenarios in mind, and more about supporting collaborative activities that may need to be done.
All-hands meetings, investor updates, board meetings, newsletters, planning cycles, and so on are examples of things that are within Relay's scope. New-hire, customer, or feature launches are functions specific to them. It is aimed at reducing admin from various business functions.
Relay sits on top of existing productivity tools such as calendars and team collaboration software, and reduces the amount of manual labor involved in organizing a specific event or activity. A monthly all-hands meeting may involve several contributors from different departments, each charged with preparing their own updates, with Relay, companies can preconfigure a lot of the administrative steps such as messaging contributors a few days before the all-hands with the correct presentation template, who are then
The image is from Relay.
If the all-hands meeting date has to be pushed back a few days at the last minute, this would normally require organizers or management to manually update dates and schedules in Asana. Change is reflected up and down the chain with Relay.
The most consequential difference between our product and what is out there is that we are going after a class of use- cases that haven't been explicitly served before. The operating workflows required to run a great team include all-hands, leads meetings, executive updates, product reviews, business reviews, newsletters, planning processes, and much more.
Relay is currently a closed early-access product and will transition into an open alpha phase before the end of the year. Ramp and Lumos were confirmed as design partners as it readies for a wider roll out.
Bank said that most of their early design partners are tech companies.
In order to take things to the next level, Relay has raised $5 million in a seed funding round, with participation from Neo, Box Group, and a handful of angel investors.
The entire way people work could be changed by Lay's vision of understanding the best practices of top-performing teams. Jacob is a founder that we have supported before, with a team that has a track record of success.
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