Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders S11 E29: Sarah Lucena, Mappa
Dec 16, 2025
Sarah Lucena, Founder and CEO of MAPA, shares her journey from feeling unfulfilled in her career to creating behavior-mapping technology that enhances hiring processes. She discusses how analyzing voice and biomarker data can predict team compatibility and shares insights into her early days with an artisanal MVP. Sarah emphasizes MAPA's mission to foster genuine human connections and the importance of feedback-driven product development. With plans for a 2026 public API launch, she highlights the value of relationships and a people-first approach in her tech vision.
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Voice As A Rich Behavioral Signal
- MAPA analyzes speech biomarkers (semantic and prosodic) to predict behavior and compatibility.
- Voice features like pronoun use, verb choices, pitch, and jitter map to teamwork, control, and action orientation.
Leaving Comfort To Solve A Personal Problem
- Sarah felt empty leading a large marketing team despite external success and repeated rebuilding of that team.
- That dissatisfaction led her to start MAPA to solve deeper compatibility problems in hiring.
MVP Was A Spreadsheet
- The first MAPA MVP was an artisanal spreadsheet collecting metadata and behavioral signals from socials.
- Sarah and Pablo manually reached out to candidates and sold compatibility matches before building software.