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 struggling to build a marketing team and feeling like she had made the wrong hires. “I was hiring for what I thought were the right skills. It looked great on paper but didn’t really work in real life,” Lucena said.
She realized hiring is often based on success markers like degrees and experience, but believed there was a better method. She developed Mappa, creating a proprietary dataset from hundreds of interviews to analyze behavior via speech patterns. Mappa found candidates need to be compatible beyond just qualifications.
“There’s no trait that’s good or bad inherently; it’s about the environment and roles aligned with their tendencies and styles,” Lucena explained on the podcast.
Mappa’s all Latinx team knows the frustration of being overlooked due to biases or lack of “correct” experiences. Lucena calls them underdogs who deeply understand this issue.
“We are all underdogs. We’ve been overlooked. This drives us to build this technology with quality, opening doors for others to create tech in diverse ways,” Lucena said.
Lucena advises early-stage founders to ensure compatibility from the start to avoid repeated hiring for the same role.
Isabelle Johannessen hosts Build Mode. It’s produced and edited by Maggie Nye with audience development led by Morgan Little, thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.