Peter Sisson Next Generation Award

Maca Baigorria

Maca is the Founder and CEO of Jack, an AI-native hiring platform built to make hiring fairer and faster for the people on both sides of it. Since launching Jack in 2025, she has grown its network to more than 250,000 job seekers and rebuilt the hiring process around what people can actually do rather than what fits on a resume. She is also Head of Growth Lab at StartOut, where she helps LGBTQ+ founders scale their companies and build the networks that got her where she is.

Maca is a two-time founder. Before Jack, she founded and led Avocademy, a Y Combinator-backed career accelerator that helped thousands of people move into UX and technology roles and grew to more than $7 million in revenue. Watching students hit the same broken hiring systems over and over is what led her to build Jack. Across both companies her focus has stayed the same: widening access to opportunity and giving people a real shot regardless of their background or pedigree.

Born in Argentina and now splitting her time between Miami and New York, Maca is an openly queer entrepreneur who believes no one should have to build alone. Much of her work, whether mentoring founders, investing as an angel, or leading the Growth Lab, comes back to the same idea: that finding your people is what makes hard things possible. Off the clock, you will usually find her on a basketball or pickleball court, or watching the WNBA.