Gil Feig, CTO and co-founder of Merge, shares his challenging experience with integration maintenance, which inspired him to create Merge, a platform designed to simplify and manage customer integrations more effectively. He describes the unexpected difficulties his team faced due to frequent third-party API changes and outages, which often broke their integrations and required immediate troubleshooting, leading to a stressful work environment with difficult prioritization decisions and uninspiring tasks. Merge aims to alleviate these challenges by offering a Unified API that supports a wide range of integrations across various software categories, providing resilient solutions to common issues and enabling engineers to focus on more impactful work. The platform's team of partner engineers is equipped to quickly diagnose and fix issues, minimizing the impact on clients and enhancing the overall experience of managing integrations.