Sitting down to testify before Congress, Cara Jones said she wasn’t nervous.
For more than a decade, Jones has been working to advance Traffic Jam, the platform developed by her startup Marinus Analytics that analyzes online data to gather evidence for human trafficking cases. She’s become an expert in using modern tech to help police agencies catch these crimes.
“As long as you’re making forward progress and you’re making an impact, stay the course. Don’t hold yourself to the traditional business metrics.”
Cara Jones, Marinus Analytics
Last December, when it was time to speak before a House subcommittee about how tech is fighting human trafficking, she had no problem sharing what her team has been able to accomplish.
In the last two years alone, Jones’s company has used AI-powered tech to analyze 60,000 missing person records and locate 734 victims between the ages of 13 and 25 being advertised for sexual services online.
It’s been a long journey for Jones to get to Capitol Hill, though, filled with years in the private sector before she found her calling helping identify victims around the world.
“Being in service, it turns out, that’s very important to me, but it took me a while to discover that about myself,” Jones told Technical.ly. “When you’re an engineering and technology major and you go to career fairs, a lot of the top recruiters are not public sector organizations.”
Before Jones was the cofounder and CEO of Pittsburgh-based tech company Marinus Analytics, she used her computer engineering degree and MBA in technology management to work in the field of robotics.
It led her to the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she mentored her future cofounder Emily Kennedy, who was researching the predictive patterns of sex trafficking online — a project that would eventually become Traffic Jam.
“[Emily] connected me on the phone with a federal agent in Colorado who was investigating child trafficking. A child happened to be missing, and they were trying to locate her for safeguarding,” Jones said. “When I heard that story and how Traffic Jam was helping identify the whereabouts of that missing victim, that gripped me.”
The work reminded her of her parents, especially her father, a career social worker who specialized in child welfare and the treatment of people with mental illness who commit crimes. A brutal local case was also on her mind at the time, Jones said.
Those factors led her to pivot her career, launching Marinus with Kennedy in 2014.
“I think there’s a strong intrinsic reward of doing this work, day in and day out,” Jones said. “The entrepreneurial piece of it, too, felt very natural to me. I wasn’t intimidated by the lack of resources.”
In this edition of Technical.ly’s How I Got Here series, Jones shares how her technical background, lean startup thinking and commitment to public safety has shaped her company’s growth.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
How do you stay motivated to work in this field when the problem of human trafficking can feel never-ending?
The key motivation that keeps me going every day is knowing that our work matters.
At times in the journey, I’ve experienced mental health challenges. There was one profound low moment I remember.
Through funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, we were able to scale up screening of commercial sexual exploitation of youth, which systematically checked missing persons data online. Once that system was turned on, there was a flood of cases that we didn’t know existed.
That was a shock. It was good that we brought those cases to the surface so action could be taken, but I also felt concerned that we had missed those cases up until then. You feel like you didn’t do the job you were supposed to do.
But now that it’s been running for two years, it’s bringing the time down to respond to those cases from months to days. It’s how you look at the problem. That form of exploitation is not completely eradicated year after year, but we’re helping the public safety system become more sophisticated in reacting to these issues that manifest in online spaces and speed up intervention.
How relevant is your technical background in your role as CEO?
In other professions, sometimes there’s a clearer taxonomy of career titles and progression. In computer engineering, the field is broad, and early on, it was challenging to understand what type of position would be a good fit for who I am.
My undergraduate and graduate degrees set me up for my current role, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Back in the early 2000s, “product manager” was still an emerging title. But that’s essentially the role I hold now, and it’s the part of the job I enjoy most. I especially love connecting directly with frontline investigators. That’s a tremendous source of joy and motivation for me.
When I worked in robotics, and as you can see in today’s robotic landscape, there’s an ongoing challenge of getting from research and development to an operational, reliable and proven state. But I learned a lot about those concepts from my early work experience as well as my academic background.
When we had conversations with policing agencies, sometimes this was the first time that they had considered a tool that wasn’t an on-premise software license. By structuring it as software as a service, it’s allowed us to continue to innovate in parallel to it being available for use now.
It’s been very important that we democratize access to these tools for public safety. I’ve always felt that this software as a service was a very democratic way to make sure that these tools could be accessible and formally adopted across the landscape of different-sized agencies.
What resources did you rely on while launching your company?
Locally, we have a number of incubators, so that was a resource that I was aware of. In the early stage of working on Traffic Jam with Emily Kennedy, we were part of Project Olympus, Carnegie Mellon’s incubator.
After that, we worked with Idea Foundry. They had a social impact accelerator, and that was very helpful. We got monetary support and mentoring, which was instrumental to helping us with the tech transfer, guiding us through the formation of Marinus and validating the direction we were taking the company. It gave us the confidence to keep troubleshooting.
Then, we were part of the National Science Foundation. One of the programs was I-Corps, which also focused on the tech transfer and lean entrepreneurship methodology. It was very helpful for us to make the most of our resources in those early years.
Any advice for early-stage founders building a startup with a strong social mission?
In the early years, if you look at any of the traditional charts or metrics around startups and startup growth, our growth was very gradual, but that’s when we were also incubating and doing a lot of the foundational software engineering.
As long as you’re making forward progress and you’re making an impact, stay the course. Don’t hold yourself to the traditional business metrics. That might be a demotivator.
For us, I felt very comfortable curing that incubation period when we were building our own foundation. We were a very small entity, and relatively speaking, we are still very small — we have 20 employees. In this day and age, with the advancements of cloud computing and AI, there are a lot of good tools that you can be empowered to use. You can be a very small team and still deliver a significant impact.
Thankfully, here in the Pittsburgh market, we are very supportive of the startup community, so being small is not a detractor. If you can do social impact work in a sustainable way, that’s something to be very proud of.
