Paulo Marinas

I grew up in Metro Manila, the youngest child in a large family. My father was a contractor—one of the most prominent in postwar Philippines—and a tireless worker. He and I didn’t always understand each other, but I learned discipline and frugality from him, and those traits have been with me my entire professional life.

I began studying physics but switched to computer science once I realized it offered a faster, more hands-on path to building things. I started out building third-party web tools for everything from personal blogs to government databases. Corporate clients were my favorite because they didn’t micromanage. They told me what they needed and let me figure out how to do it. It was the perfect environment to learn new frameworks and stretch my skills.

I’ve always been an open-source enthusiast. One of my proudest early achievements was a JavaScript tool called Flexigrid, which I built on top of jQuery. It helped render dynamic tables across incompatible browsers, which was still a huge challenge in the early 2000s. The code I wrote back then still runs on modern browsers.

The ImportGenius data platform is a massive trove of potential insight into the global economy, and we’re investing heavily in AI to make it even better. We update our trade data daily, but it’s messy. With AI and careful architecture, we’ll be able to extract accurate, usable insight from the data faster than ever.

Our service has five key pillars: fresh, responsive data; smart integration and entity resolution; leveraging overlap across datasets; building infrastructure that scales; and unlocking the data’s potential for our users.

AI has a role to play in each one. It’s a massive challenge, but this is what I do best: solve hard technical problems that others walk away from. It’s challenging, never-ending—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.