π§π»βπ» Issue #85: The Twilio For PDFs
Josh Lewis shares the stories of his first exposure to the tech scene, his transition from academia back into tech, and the founding of Sensible - the Twilio for PDFs
π¬ Welcome to issue #85 ofΒ Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. Oofβ¦itβs been a wild week in the startup and VC world with the SVBust, but we hope everyone is still hanging in there. Gotta have the valleys to appreciate the views from the top.
This week, Claremont graduate Josh Lewis (PO β06) talks about the inspiration behind building his own software company, the ups and downs of an early-stage startup, and how Sensible is helping solve the day-to-day struggles of engineering and product teams. Itβs a Claremont world out there. π
~ Josh, Miles, & Pat
π€ Community Spotlight: Josh Lewis & Sensible
Josh Lewis is the CEO and co-founder of Sensible β developer tools for turning documents into structured data. Their mission is to make the stuff of everyday work, like documents and emails, as accessible to software as an API. Josh graduated from PO in 2006 before joining the Cognitive Science Department at UCSD to complete his Ph.D. Before co-founding Sensible, he also spent time at a couple of ML and data science startups in engineering and product leadership roles, where his passion for building startups was ignited.
After numerous stints of leading product and engineering at different insurance and software startups, how did you develop the conviction for what you created and are building now with Sensible and APIs for structured data?
The problem that we're solving is one that I ran into while I was at Newfront β a commercial insurance brokerage/technology startup. We were measuring what our ops folks were spending time on and they were spending way too much time doing data entry off of these documents that we'd get from our carrier partners. We'd have clients that come in trying to get insurance coverage for their business, like general liability, commercial auto, or whatever it was. Weβd get documents back from the carriers saying how much that's going to cost and what the coverage limits are. Then our account managers were typing all this into a system of record.
We saw that these account managers were spending hours doing essentially just data entry, and these were licensed trained professionals. We didn't want them to be doing this work. I figured there had to be something like Twilio for PDFs that just makes this really easy for me as a developer and that we could buy some SaaS and solve this problem.
Turns out, there was no Twilio for PDFs; so we decided to try to roll out our own. I built up a little internal query language to quickly pull data out of these documents in a way that could then be piped downstream. That was my introduction to this problem, which is how to go from PDFs, or documents in general, to useful structured data. With Sensible, we're doing that as developer tools, where we are that solution that I was looking for back in the day. We sell to a lot of startups, engineering and product teams, and also larger companies.
Can you tell us more about what youβre building at Sensible and your target customers and use cases?
Weβre in this nice period where weβve very much done the zero-to-one growth and now have dozens of customers. We just added another dozen this past quarter and are growing quickly. Essentially, weβve solved the core problem, we have an approach, and we know that it resonates with product and engineering teams. Now, we just have to go and replicate it and get good at go-to-market.
Weβve gotten this nice representative set of customers across different industries, weβve shown that the technology works, and weβve shown that it can scale. So what weβve done since raising our most recent round is we hired a Head of Marketing; we hired a couple of our first enterprise sales folks; we revamped our website; and weβve gotten more active in terms of what weβre doing in sponsoring newsletters and other forms of paid media. Weβre building that engine so that everyone who has this problem is aware that Sensible is a good solution to it.
On the technology side, we think about how to keep making it easier to quickly solve these problems and quickly get into production. One of our themes for 2023 is breaking down barriers. Anything that slows someone down in getting up and running, getting their problem solved with Sensible, is something that we want to fix. To that end, weβre wrapping super powerful NLP techniques in a simple UI to make extracting data from many kinds of documents almost trivial.
What is one of the most important lessons youβve learned so far as a startup founder that you think everyone should learn at some point in their career?
A very powerful memory from early in Sensible was when we had just set up our Gmail accounts. We had our domain and an empty email account. In our AWS logs was just my test API calls, no real activity. It was a real blank page moment. Fast forward to today, it's such an amazing feeling having tens of thousands of calls coming in. The whole thing is lit up and a lot of people are hopefully getting value making API calls with Sensible.
That transition from the stillness of creation to the pandemonium of a company in action is very gratifying. What I've learned is that it's not some crazy, discontinuous thing to make that transition. It's just sustained incremental and intelligent effort over a long period of time.Β
Some folks have the perspective that leadership at a company is all about deep strategic decisions. It's got to be less than 1% of the time I've spent that's been spent on anything approaching strategy. You do have those thoughts and you want to be aware of what's going on in the market. You try to do smart little pivots or you try to steal good ideas and other stuff. But the absolute massive majority of the work is much more about these good, small, micro decisions and good incremental progress. As long as you're overall pointed in a reasonable direction, good things will happen. π
πΌ Whoβs Hiring?: Agile Six & Mahmee
In 2014, Claremont grad Brian Derfer (PO β90) co-founded Agile Six β a full-spectrum digital services company whose mission is to transform government and private sector relationships. Agile Six works with government agencies to create customized digital solutions that meet the needs of their users. Since their founding, they have helped build the civic tech marketplace and have worked with clients like the Centers for Medicare, Medicaid Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs to revolutionize their digital services.Β
Agile Six has quickly grown in size to over 60 employees in 15 different states. If youβre interested to learn more about this fully remote team, check out all their open positions here:
Mahmee, co-founded by Claremont graduate and CEO Melissa Hanna (POβ 09 & CGU β15), is an integrated care delivery platform for maternal and infant health. Their team is building digital infrastructure to connect patients, independent health professionals, and enterprise healthcare organizations to ensure that moms and babies donβt fall through the cracks of the U.S. healthcare system. The maternal healthcare startup is backed by Serena Williams and Mark Cuban, and they raised a $9.2M Series A last year, led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Theyβre currently hiring for several positions:
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. Weβve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform β so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye π , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
π£οΈ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This weekβs top read π₯
Chorus Sleep, co-founded by Claremont grad and CEO Ali Abramovitz (CMC β12), recently did a joint study with Asana and Inc. that shows how sleep directly impacts collaborative skills and leadership abilities. Chorus is a non-pharmaceutical solution to insomnia that combines relaxing audio sessions with short, interactive content and sleep tracking to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
This weekβs top listen π§
Claremont entrepreneur Sam Corcos (CMC β07) sat down with a16zβs Vijay Pande to talk about the founding story of Levels, and to share his insights on how to decide who becomes CEO if you have multiple co-founders. Sam is the CEO and co-founder of Levels β a health and wellness company committed to improving metabolic health through biowearables.
Everything else you need to knowπ‘
Casetext shares that their groundbreaking AI legal assistant, CoCounsel, is powered by OpenAI's latest GPT-4 language model, and that a forthcoming study will confirm GPT-4 has passed both the multiple-choice and written portions of the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE). Casetext, founded by Claremont grad and CEO Jake Heller (PZ β07), is a legaltech company that develops AI-powered technology for lawyers.
Canβt get enough of Between the Lines? Follow and connect with us on Twitter!
π½οΈ BTL Snacks:
π¦ A Market For Edible Bugsβ¦.. Claremont entrepreneur Patrick Crowley (CMC β02) discusses the potential of edible insects becoming a viable and sustainable food source for a growing global population. He shares his personal story of how he got into the edible insect industry and why he believes this can make a positive impact on the world. Pat is the Founder and CEO of Chapul β maker of the world's first cricket bar, which secured an investment from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank in 2014.
π³ Nature Getβs An Upgradeβ¦.. Engineers are developing machines to suck carbon out of the air and power plants that can store it underground, but neither method has been proven efficient at scale. Claremont grad Maddie Hall (CMC β14) and her company, Living Carbon, approach this problem by modifying tree seedlings to grow 50% faster and capture 27% more carbon than before through a process known as particle bombardment. Quartz explores the risks associated with this technology and how this breakthrough could be an effective way of fighting climate change.
π¦Έ The ALS Hero's Crusadeβ¦.. CMC pays tribute to fitness industry pioneer and ALS hero Augie Nieto (CMC β80). In a feature article on the CMC website, they talk about Augieβs CMC journey, where it all started, and how he captured the national spotlight when he transformed his ALS diagnosis into a crusade for a cure. Augie was previously the Founder and CEO of Life Fitness. He is also the Founder and Chairman of Augieβs Quest to Cure ALS.
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