Semantic Leverage | Albert Mangahas (Roo)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
On to it, Albert Mangahas, sir, you're in Vancouver. How often do you come to Vancouver?

**Albert Mangahas** (0:05)
This is my first time. Oh yeah, it's your first time. My wife is actually originally from Toronto, so I always love an excuse to go to Canada.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
Oh yeah?

**Albert Mangahas** (0:13)
This is a little bit further from Toronto, but Canada nonetheless, I love it.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:17)
How often do you guys make it?

**Albert Mangahas** (0:19)
Oh, it's been a while. Last time we were in Toronto was pre-COVID.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Wow, a long time ago.

**Albert Mangahas** (0:25)
Yeah, it's been a while. So good to be back in Canada, but can't wait to go back with the family.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:31)
So she doesn't usually visit the Great White North?

**Albert Mangahas** (0:34)
Not as often as she'd like, but I think we're overdue for a trip.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:39)
Okay, there you go. Well, it's great to have you here. So I'm excited for today's conversation.
I mean, we had, I think a podcast like a year ago?

**Albert Mangahas** (0:48)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:49)
Yeah, right?

**Albert Mangahas** (0:50)
Something like that. Yeah, time has flown by, but.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:52)
And we only did one.

**Albert Mangahas** (0:53)
We only did one.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:54)
Oh yeah, yeah. But it was great. And it really warranted a second one.

**Albert Mangahas** (0:58)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:58)
Right. But now on every level, we're kind of upgrading it. So we're also catching you at an interesting time in your career, which I'm sure we'll talk about, right? But just for the scope of this conversation, as I mentioned to you before, so a lot happened in the past 25 years in business, digital, data, AI. It's kind of been crazy, right? There are fascinating stories in there. And I just wanted to take this opportunity to just review that whole story. And I get to do it from your perspective, which is going to be a lot of fun. So that's what I would like to do today. And maybe let's just turn back the clock to the Matrix comes out in 1999 I don't know why, but this is my new anchor for some sort of sharing point.
2000, right? Where are you in 2000?

**Albert Mangahas** (1:50)
2000, I am still in the middle of university at the time. And I was studying at USC or University of Southern California down in Los Angeles.
And at that time, actually interesting, I started off as like a computer science major. Loved it. But my roommate at the time convinced me to pursue industrial engineering, which I had no idea what it was. But this idea, the concept of trying to make things better, really resonated. And obviously, there's a lot of different applications of industrial engineering. But yeah, that led me to industrial engineering. And from there, the kind of career kind of evolved in a lot of interesting ways.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:34)
Why did you get into computer science to begin with?

**Albert Mangahas** (2:38)
I think really the impetus of this was, my dad was a computer programmer at Sunkist for like 25 years straight. And I actually had no idea what that meant growing up, but always got intrigued by it.
And it just felt like something where I do enjoy math, enjoy problem solving, and felt like the right thing to do. I still enjoyed it. I actually enjoyed all the classes. But again, I think I started to evolve like, I don't know how I feel about just pure coding all the time. How do I think about actually improving or actually optimizing things and actually solving problems was super, super interesting. And so that led to, again, this interesting role or interesting major of industrial engineering. And then the most random part, there was just one class, there was a SQL class.
And so the one SQL class, I fell in love with it. There was this idea of data and then now data and how to improve things. The intersection of that kind of was the start of my career.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:42)
I love that because everyone has heard story of how did you come to data, their own little love story and some of them are, well, I encounter SQL.

**Albert Mangahas** (3:51)
It was it. Yeah, it was this one SQL class. I didn't know what to expect. But some people are not as excited by it, but I was just, what made you excited about it? I think it just it allowed me to really think through breaking down the problem more. And it's like not only understanding, oh, here's a business, here's a business problem. When you start to look at the building blocks of a business, all of it kind of is grounded in the actual data. And how do you analyze it? How is it stored and all these things that maybe people don't care about, but it is foundational to, at least for me, the way that I like to operate is, it's like really understanding kind of the building pieces, the building blocks, and that's data.