One of the things that actually attracted me to this PDF problem is that it's what you might

call embarrassingly parallel, right? Like, it's, or it's task parallel. Every single PDF extraction

that we're doing in that, like, live API environment is completely isolated from every other one,

right? And you can, you can consider them totally independently.

There's no shared state or anything like that.

So that meant that we could build our platform from day one in a way that just took advantage of that

and was completely horizontally scalable out the gate.

That means that we've never really had scaling problems.

My name is Josh Lewis.

I'm the co-founder and CEO at Sensible.

This is Code Story, the podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change in industry and build and lead.

A team that has your back.

I'm your host, Noah Labhart, and today how Josh Lewis built a way for you to be fast and flexible with extracting data from your documents. All this and more

on code story. Josh Lewis was fascinated by computers in the late 80s and early 90s. In the early days,

he was the neighborhood tech support fixing people's

computers around the block. He quickly moved into programming, but moved off from technology

in college, targeting philosophy and going to grad school. In doing research with the computer

science component, he was pulled back into technology and went to work in Palo Alto. Outside of tech, he's a dad taking care of his

young family, and also he plays competitive drafts of Magic the Gathering, along with some tennis.

At his last company, Josh experienced a recurring problem in spades, where account managers were spending large amounts of time

with data entry of standardized forms and information. When he looked for the Twilio for

PDFs, he couldn't find a tool to solve its problem. This is the creation story of Sensible.

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