This week on TechCrunch’s founder-focused podcast Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen is joined by Sarah Lucena, the CEO and co-founder of Mappa, a behavioral intelligence platform that uses voice AI to decode human behavior in less than 60 seconds.
Lucena got the idea for Mappa after trying to build a marketing team, but constantly felt she had made the wrong hires. “And I was so frustrated because I was hiring for what I thought were the right skills. It looked great on paper, but it didn’t really work in real life,” Lucena said.
He had learned firsthand that hiring is usually based on indicators of success such as college degrees, previous work experience and guts. But he knew there had to be a better way. So she developed Mappa and spent years building 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 make the right hire the first time, a candidate can’t just be great on paper. they must also be compatible.
“There’s no trait that’s inherently good or bad. It’s more about what environment you put that person in and what roles are best aligned with people’s tendencies and styles. That’s how we came up with defining compatibility,” Lucena said in the podcast interview.
Mappa is powered by an all-Latinx team that knows how frustrating it is to be overlooked based on superficial biases or a lack of the “right” experiences. He describes them as outsiders who understand this problem on a personal level.
“We’re all outsiders. We’re all people who have been overlooked to some degree. And I guess that makes it even more important that we’re the ones building this,” Lucena said. “Having people like us build this technology, at the level that we do, with the quality that we can get to market and serve our customers the way that we do. It also opens a door for others to come in and participate and know that there are still many ways to build technology.”
Lucena’s best advice for early-stage founders hiring is to take your time and make sure the fit is there from the start to avoid the hassle of hiring, firing, and re-hiring for the same role.
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Isabelle Johannessen is our host. Construction mode Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Head of Audience Development is Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.
