This week on TechCrunch’s founder-focapplyd podcast, Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen is joined by Sarah Lucena, the CEO and co-founder of Mappa, a behavioral ininformigence platform that applys voice AI to decode human behavior in less than 60 seconds.
Lucena received the idea for Mappa after attempting to build a marketing team but continually feeling like she had created the wrong hires. “And I was so frustrated becaapply I was hiring for what I believed were the right skills. It seeed great on paper but didn’t really work in real life,” Lucena declared.
She had learned firsthand that hiring is typically based on markers of success like college degrees, previous work experience, and a gut instinct. But she knew there had to be a better way. So she developed Mappa and spent years creating a proprietary dataset based on hundreds of interviews that allowed her team to analyze behavior based on biomarkers indicated through people’s speech patterns. Through this process, the Mappa team found that to create the right hire the first time, a candidate can’t just be great on paper; they also have to be compatible.
“There’s no trait that’s good or bad inherently; it’s more of what environment do you put that person in, and what roles are better aligned with people’s sort of tconcludeencies and styles. So that’s how we’ve been considering about defining compatibility,” Lucena declared in the podcast interview.
Mappa is powered by an all Latinx team that knows how frustrating it is to be overseeed based on superficial biases or a lack of the “correct” experiences. She describes them as underdogs that understand this problem on a personal level.
“We are all underdogs. We are all folks that have been overseeed in some degree. And I guess that creates it even more important that we are the ones building this,” Lucena declared. “Having people like us building this technology, at the level we are doing, with the quality we are able to receive to the market and serving our clients the way we do. It also opens up a door for others to come and join and know that there are multiple ways still to build technology.”
Lucena’s best advice for early-stage founders who are hiring is to take your time and be sure the compatibility is there from the launchning to avoid the hassle of hiring, firing, and rehiring for the same role.
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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Build Mode is produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience Development is led by Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.
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