- Mike Shebet is the CEO of Traba, a tech company aiming to be worth a trillion dollars.
- Traba is focused on disrupting the light industrial staffing industry and creating more jobs for American workers.
- Mike's background includes working at Goldman Sachs and Uber, where he gained valuable experience in finance and launching new markets.
- Traba's key strategies include targeting a niche market, solving inefficiencies in the staffing industry, and leveraging the massive global labor market.
- Mike recruited Akshay Budiga as his co-founder and CTO, and secured funding from Keith Raboy at Founders Fund.
- Traba has already raised over $43 million in funding and is growing rapidly.

- The founders of Traba, Mike and Akshay, met through a mutual connection and decided to work together on building the company.
- They initially faced challenges in getting their co-founder, Keith, to share details about Traba, but eventually he showed them an impressive draft of the company's deck.
- The team worked together to refine materials and build the first product, using a combination of no-code and coding.
- They focused on finding workers and businesses that needed each other and used guerrilla tactics to attract potential customers.
- The team landed their first big client by approaching them directly and offering a solution to their staffing needs.
- Scaling the business required aggressive efforts to acquire more clients and close deals.
- The team discovered that there was a high demand for work, but people wanted to work on their own terms.
- Traba aimed to solve the labor matching problem by providing a convenient platform for workers and businesses to connect.
- The company's use of technology and software made it easier for workers to find jobs and for employers to hire the right candidates.
- Traba's goal is to consolidate the staffing industry and expand internationally, potentially reaching a trillion-dollar valuation.

- Traba is a company that uses geolocation tracking to improve staffing agency processes.
- The company had a tight deadline to develop their app before an interview with the mayor of Miami.
- They worked hard to build the app in a month and successfully released it.
- Traba received funding and achieved a million-dollar milestone, leading to their Series A investment from Coastal Ventures.
- The company values hard work and has a strong work ethic, which sets them apart from competitors.
- Traba expanded to Texas and aims to dominate every state they can legally operate in.
- Despite challenges in the market, Traba's focus on hard work has kept customers and investors committed to the company.
- Founders Fund, a venture capital firm, led a new round of funding for Traba and expressed confidence in the company's growth and unit economics.
- Traba operates in the logistics industry, which may seem boring but is crucial to the American economy.

- The speaker highlights the hidden world of production and supply chain in everyday items like chips and other products.
- They emphasize the importance of the people who work in these industries and the need for a marketplace to connect businesses and workers more efficiently.
- The speaker believes that technology companies should focus on helping companies find human workers rather than solely relying on automation.
- They mention the lack of attention given to labor side of businesses and the importance of trust in fixing labor-related issues.
- The speaker sees Traba as an interesting example of a high-growth startup in 2023.

- Traba is a tech company aiming to disrupt the light industrial staffing industry and create more jobs for American workers.
- The CEO, Mike Shebet, has experience in finance and launching new markets from his time at Goldman Sachs and Uber.
- Traba's strategies include targeting a niche market, solving inefficiencies in the staffing industry, and leveraging the global labor market.
- The company has raised over $43 million in funding and is growing rapidly.
- Traba's founders met through a mutual connection and worked together to build the company.
- They focused on finding workers and businesses that needed each other and used guerrilla tactics to attract customers.
- Traba aims to solve the labor matching problem by providing a convenient platform for workers and businesses to connect.
- The company values hard work and has a strong work ethic, setting them apart from competitors.
- Traba expanded to Texas and aims to dominate every state they can legally operate in.
- Founders Fund led a new round of funding for Traba and expressed confidence in the company's growth.
- Traba operates in the logistics industry and emphasizes the importance of connecting businesses and workers efficiently.
- The speaker sees Traba as an interesting example of a high-growth startup in 2023.

Check out my podcast, Power Law, on:
-Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/power-law-with-john-coogan/id1704200890
-Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL3Bvd2VyLWxhdw==
-Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2JcCU31J07hCMxw99RWVRk?si=22a29d9b17604512

Enter your email here: http://johncoogan.com

ABOUT JOHN COOGAN:
I am the co-founder of http://soylent.com and http://lucy.co, both of which were funded by Y Combinator (Summer 2012 and Winter 2018).

I've been an entrepreneur for the last decade across multiple companies. I've done a lot of work in Silicon Valley, so that's mostly what I talk about. I've raised over 10 rounds of venture capital totaling over $100m in funding.

I work mostly in tech-enabled consumer packaged goods, meaning I use software to make the best products possible

CONTACT:
You can get in touch with me via Twitter: https://twitter.com/johncoogan

Disclaimer: This video is purely my opinion and should not be regarded as a primary source. I am not a financial advisor and this is not a recommendation to buy or sell securities. Always do your own due diligence.

Mike Shebet is on a mission to build the next trillion-dollar tech company.

Every single person at his company really believes it.

Like literally every single person from an EA all the way up to the CEO of Yes or How Much Is

Which sounds insane until you're like, oh wait a second, these people actually believe this.

don't shy away from saying that we're going to be bigger than Microsoft or Amazon.

Everyone in this room will not stop until that's reality.

But instead of going after something flashy like humanoid robots, Mike is making his trillion dollar bet against automation, and his company will actually create more jobs for American workers.

Our mission is to empower both businesses and workers to reach their full productivity and potential.

His company is called Traba, and even though startups are dying left and right throughout Silicon Valley right now, Mike's company is growing insanely fast and has already raised over $43 million in funding in just 2 years.

And could it really be the next trillion dollar company?

Well, I sat down with Mike and his team and learned that there are 3 key strategies that could make Traba's trillion dollar bet a winner.

I'm Mike Shevitt and I'm the CEO of Traba.

To understand Traba, you first need to understand Mike's early days in tech.

He grew up just outside Washington, D.C., went to college at the University of Virginia to study economics, and quickly found himself on a traditional finance track.

Goldman Sachs Investment Banking was the most prestigious job on Wall Street for new grads, but they weren't hiring at his college, so he had to hustle and cold email his way into an internship.

I just wrote a bunch of essays and things like that on to submit to all these investment banks.

And then I ended up getting the Goldman Sachs internship.

The plan worked, but after a few years working in finance, he realized he wanted to get his hands dirty in a real business instead of just shuffling spreadsheets for the rest of his life.

It wasn't very intellectually stimulating because hedge funds are not that complicated from an operational standpoint.

So he joined a company you've probably never heard of, McMaster Carr.

Which if you look them up online, it looks boring.

It's like a bunch of screws, it's a bunch of bolts and hammers that you buy.

So they reach out, hey we have a management rotation program, we'd love to get to know you.

Even though they don't have a consumer brand, their parts power a huge portion of the American economy.

SpaceX was a big customer of ours in LA, So when SpaceX would have to build a massive rocket, they would be like, let's order a bunch of product from McMasterCar, the engineering supplier.

It was at McMasterCar where Mike first came into contact with the light industrial staffing industry he would go on to try and disrupt years later.

I know, it sounds boring, but this experience would lay the foundation of Traba.

So part of my job with trying to manage that was, of course, you want to manage your team in the warehouse, but you also start relying on staffing.

That's how I discovered the staffing industry.

Anytime the company needed to ship out parts to a customer, Mike would have to call a bunch of temporary staffing firms to try and get them to send out workers to help pack boxes and fulfill orders.

It was a time-consuming, laborious process that was full of inefficiencies.

So then that's when I felt the pain point.

And so less than half the people show up because the staffing industry is an archaic industry that is spoiled by the business critical need that you're solving.

Mike learned a lot at McMaster Car, but he still wanted to move faster.

So he joined Uber and quickly earned a reputation for his insane work ethic and ability to get things done.

His managers noticed, and Mike was quickly tasked with the job of launching Uber Eats into new markets.

It was a small incubation in Los Angeles and Toronto.

His story of how Uber launches new markets is fascinating.

And it really illustrates how young people can move mountains when they have the autonomy to execute quickly.

So basically I was responsible for launching Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

So essentially what an Uber launch looks like is you fly into the market.

We have some idea of what worked in previous markets.

So you have to build out a sales team from scratch.

So you drop into a market, you hire a bunch of people that are interested in sales, you build a lead list, and then you have a bunch of sales reps close a bunch of restaurants.

Then you start building out your driver supply, so your courier supply.

So now you have your drivers and your couriers.

Now you have to do like a huge marketing stunt for your eaters.

So for Brazil, we did free beer on Uber Eats and we literally went from being like out of the top 100 on the app store because we were president in Sao Paulo to number 1 in the app store and we broke everything.

But like I got the opportunity to scale that to 16 different countries.

So I got to see time and time again what works and what doesn't when building a marketplace product.

At a three-sided marketplace, Uber Eats is harder than a two-sided marketplace.

So with McMaster Car, Mike had seen the time-consuming inefficiencies with temp staffing, and at Uber, Mike had learned how to solve the chicken and egg problem involved in launching a new marketplace.

It was only logical that he would put these 2 skills together and start a company.

But it was also the perfect time for this, since America's supply chain was about to go through massive upheaval.

The pandemic has turned economies upside down.

supply chain challenges in the time of COVID-19.

That's helping to drive this whole workforce shortage across all industries.

I knew I wanted to start something of my own, but during COVID, I actually saw how a lot of things were fundamentally changing, and there was a massive labor shortage.

I had kept thinking about this problem, in which case a lot of things had changed.

And like the essential worker was essentially like front and center and everyone was actually putting on those masks and going to the distribution centers to make sure that the world still had food on the table and to make sure that everyone still had masks.

I like went online, tried all the different competitor platforms, none of them actually solved the problem.

None of them catered anything to the business side.

The idea was simple, build an Uber Eats style gig marketplace that would connect workers with open shifts at distribution centers and event venues.

Old-school staffing agencies have been trying to solve this problem for decades, but the industry is still massively inefficient.

So the way a traditional staffing agency runs is they have an office and

And when you submit a request for 20 workers, they're actually calling a bunch of workers to be like, would you be willing to work at McMasterCar?

office, a telephone bank, you have all these people making phone calls.

People will literally just sit there waiting to get called to be like, hey, we need 20 people to go sit in this van so now there's more stuff.

Well, the most important thing that's broken in the light industrial staffing or basically any temporary staffing industry is what's known as a fill rate, which basically is about 45 to 50%, which basically means if you request 10 workers, you get 5.

In addition, there's also a long lead time.

So you basically have to submit a request for hourly staffing workers traditionally before trial book, at least a week in advance.

So God forbid you have variable demand in the last week, there's nothing you can do.

Staffing is the current solution to a very severe problem of the fact that your labor, which is your number 1, like, like your number 1 cost is not able to like flex up and flex down with your business.

And everybody who uses hourly wage workers just accepts that as acceptable.

And this is the first key strategy Mike is using, targeting a niche market that can expand massively over time.

Traba started as a light industrial staffing company serving Miami.

That sounds ridiculously niche, but as you'll see, starting small is actually the best way to attack the massive global labor market.

The staffing industry is a huge industry.

It's $520 billion on a global basis, but it just doesn't work.

And so if worker, you know, variable labor makes sense, the fixed cost of holding people on staff when

you have variable demand makes no economic sense.

The only reason it exists is because people actually need it to run their businesses.

Mike knew there was a big opportunity here, but he had a bunch of obstacles in his way.

He'd need companies to agree to hire workers on Traba, and he'd also need a technical co-founder to help him build it.

The first step for him was not raising capital, it was to recruit an appropriate co-founder.

He had some ideas about how to go find 1, was sort of pseudo-interviewing people.

So he joined an accelerator program called OnDeck in 2020 and met Akshay Budiga.

Yeah, so I'm Akshay, I'm the co-founder and CTO here at Travon.

A Stanford engineer with years of experience at high growth tech companies.

And I remember the weekend before the program, I'm sitting on my girlfriend, now my fiance's couch, and I was scrolling through these bios and reading them.

And I get to Mike's and I'm reading it and obviously it was a very impressive bio and my my girlfriend is reading over my shoulder she's like this guy's a winner you should definitely talk to him and then that that that weekend like the next day they had the first like onboarding sessions and all those things And so 1 of those breakout rooms, I was in the room with Mike as well.

I do think it's like a gift from God that I met Akshay.

Like I genuinely am like, I had met a lot of people.

Like he was by far the most impressive that I had met.

And so we started talking, he started telling me more about the idea for Traba.

So I knew that I had to like sell him on the vision.

I was like, this is where we're gonna go, this is like why we're gonna win in this space.

We really hit it off immediately, really clicked, and I was really excited about what he was starting to work on

With Akshay on board, he could now build the tech, but Mike also wanted to scale Traba as quickly as possible, so Mike needed VC funding.

So he reached out to my colleague, Keith Raboy, at Founders Fund to meet up and discuss the business.

I actually didn't know much about venture capital.

So despite being in finance before, I found an air table that had a bunch of investors that were in the Miami region where I was living.

Mike was already living in Lamy and sent me a LinkedIn message.

So I said, Hey, Keith, I'm like working at Uber, but I'm building something big.

So I scanned his profile, which had several impressive ingredients.

And We went to coffee across the street and he told me about, like more about what he does.

He sort of actually refused to tell me about Traba for months after we became friends.

Cause Keith actually at the time, I had not really pitched him, but he knew I was working on it.

He wanted it to be perfect, and he wanted to have everything perfectly aligned.

And then 1 day we were having coffee, and he had his laptop, and he was willing to show me the first time a draft of a deck.

It was actually really, really, really impressive.

So it immediately clicked with me that it was both a good idea and that he was very well suited to do this.

So Mike had met Keith, I think, a couple months before that.

Mike wanted to make sure that he had the right co-founder, so he scheduled a joint dinner for me to

sort of pseudo interview and check the matchmaking.

Heath had heard the stories about Akshay at the Spelling Bee.

And halfway through the dinner, Akshay told me a story.

Akshay had competed in 1 of these like spelling bee kind of things, national championship kind of thing.

Junior year I believe he finished third and kind of like sort of kind of choked to serve a third.

But then instead of giving up he went back to next year to win.

As soon as he told me the story that he went back to next year to win I was like this is perfect for Mike.

The moment Oxjay came on board, we refined some materials.

We worked with a design agency to just clean it

I was in San Francisco at the time, so I flew out to Miami and I was like, okay, I'm gonna work with Mike in person for the next week.

And so we did like basically a hackathon weekend together.

We built, we were in my apartment, like in my bedroom actually, like I'm not an engineer.

So I did a no-code product and he did actually coding.

Kind of solidified like there's something here that's a building, like we need to double down here.

So as soon as I saw about the industry, what was broken, how large it was, and then he had ideas about how to fix it, I was already impressed, already sort of willing to invest.

And so ended up closing an amazing seed round over the next week or so with Founders Fund and General Catalyst leading that round.

We had participated in Frown Village and Frown Lux capital.

I put in my 2 weeks at Uber and I was ready to build.

With money in the bank and a solid co-founding team in place, the team started building the first product.

So essentially the scene check hit in August, so 2 years ago now.

And then in that case, I immediately hit up Luis, who is our first operations employee, and he worked with me in Mexico with Uber.

From his time at Uber Eats, Mike knew that building a marketplace business would be very tricky.

You need to match the supply side with the demand side perfectly, or 1 half of your users will be disappointed.

Demand side is the customers, so the business customers, they are the demand side.

Workers are essentially the supply side that we're now matching to the demand based on their criteria.

Mike's team needed to find workers that needed jobs and businesses that needed staff at the exact time in order to match them up.

But instead of getting bogged down with building the perfect system, they just threw everything they had at the problem.

Essentially, they were doing things that don't scale.

We did like just guerrilla, like going into the warehousing district and going door to door.

We went like around fences to introduce ourselves to the managers.

Trying to get a hold of potential decision makers at these companies.

And usually you do get into conversations or you start getting information, whether they use temporary workers or not?

Doing those customer interviews, like talking to workers, and

we were like, there's definitely something here.

Like we should start building something and see, you know, what we can find out.

We put something in front of the customer and see how they react to it.

So we coded a prototype of what the app could look like.

Mike and Akshay worked hard to build the first prototype.

They recruited the first workers off the street or through personal networks.

We would sit in the back of Ubers and just ask the Uber driver, like, hey, would you actually be willing to work in a warehouse?

So we started getting a bit more density on the worker side.

And so we approached him and was like, hey, we have other opportunities on our platform if you're looking for work.

him to download the app on the spot and ended up having him work at our first business customer the next week.

Like I went and picked up the workers in my car and I was like, let's go to the first shift together.

And then on the shift, like we all made it, we were all there together as a team making sure everything went well and then I Venmo'd the workers after.

A true founder would do anything necessary to solve the problem, even if it means getting their hands dirty.

Their first big break came when they landed a small company that had been on Shark Tank.

This 1 business, which is actually 1 of our, it's a very good business of ours, it's called Crayol Essence.

So they build, they basically like create Haitian haircare products and it's a man and his wife and they were on Shark Tank.

The company needed to ship out products, and some days were much busier than others.

So they often relied on temporary staffing agencies to fill in gaps.

Akshay and I, we found their address online, we showed up and the gate was locked.

Basically broke into this place, knocked on the door and introduced ourselves to the CEO.

And we're like, we're entrepreneurs, can you give us a shot?

The model worked, the app worked, workers were getting paid and companies were able to deliver products on time again.

Mike had succeeded in scaling his first big client, but his next challenge would be even bigger, scaling his own business.

And the first milestone was making a million dollars in revenue.

But that raise to the 1000000 was basically pulling out like every stop, finding like every event client that like needed help, tracking them down, like convincing them that we could handle more and more of their work.

And then also on top of that, just aggressively, all hands on deck, everyone calling companies, everyone trying their hand at it, us upselling other clients.

But it was just a blitz of everyone sitting there being like, all right, like if you can talk to someone on the phone, like you're going to pick up the phone and try to close deals.

The team worked hard, coming up with creative solutions to problems as they arose.

So in the beginning, we had no idea about the supply demand dynamic between the workers and businesses.

If anything, everyone was saying there was a labor shortage.

Like, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, a labor shortage in America.

Economy still has a massive labor shortage.

And some businesses are having trouble hiring enough workers to reopen fully.

Interestingly, even though the common narrative in the news was that people weren't returning to the labor force, Mike and his team saw something different on the ground.

The narrative everywhere was that people didn't want to work, there was a lot of stimulus checks out there.

It was obvious that the worker acquisition was going to be easy.

In reality, we learned very quickly that everyone wanted to work.

They just wanted to work on their own terms.

You give people opportunities to earn money that's convenient, that notches their geographic preferences and their times, they just flock.

And so then it was just a question of, can we acquire businesses?

Because the worker demand was really there.

See all John Coogan transcripts on Youtube

He Quit Uber to Build a Trillion Dollar Company