Mike Shebit leads Traba, a burgeoning next-generation tech company aiming to reshape the trillion-dollar industry landscape. Traba focuses on bringing a transformative technological approach to the labor market, ultimately creating more job opportunities. Shebit's vision and the company's strategies are not just about innovation but about genuinely upgrading American workforce opportunities.

Traba distinguishes itself by targeting the inefficient staffing industry, aiming to streamline the labor market with advanced technology. Mike Shebit capitalizes on his unique insights from previous roles in finance at Goldman Sachs and operational experience at McMaster Carr and Uber. By launching Traba amidst an international labor shortage due to the pandemic, Shebit's company deploys technology as the primary lever to revolutionize human resource processes and labor force allocation.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. humanoid [ˈhjuːmənɔɪd] - (adjective) - Resembling a human in appearance or behavior. - Synonyms: (manlike, anthropoid, human-like)

But instead of going after something flashy like humanoid robots, Mike is making his trillion dollar bet against automation.

2. resurface [ˈriːˈsɜːrfɪs] - (verb) - To emerge again; to come back to people's attention. - Synonyms: (reappear, emerge, materialize)

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

3. cold email [koʊld ˈiːmeɪl] - (noun) - An unsolicited email sent to someone without prior contact. - Synonyms: (unsolicited email, introduction email, uninvited email)

...so he had to hustle and cold email his way into an internship.

4. archaic [ɑːrˈkeɪɪk] - (adjective) - Very old or old-fashioned. - Synonyms: (obsolete, outmoded, antiquated)

...because the staffing industry is an archaic industry that is spoiled by the business critical need that you're solving...

5. exhaustive [ɪɡˈzɔːstɪv] - (adjective) - Thorough and comprehensive. - Synonyms: (thorough, comprehensive, complete)

...with years of experience at high growth tech companies...

6. maniacal [məˈnaɪəkəl] - (adjective) - Exhibiting extremely wild or violent behavior. - Synonyms: (frenzied, obsessive, excessive)

His maniacal focus on showing up and delivering results every single day is what's led customers to keep using the Treva platform.

7. meritocratic [ˌmerɪtoʊˈkrætɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to a system in which advancement is based on individual ability or achievement. - Synonyms: (achievement-based, performance-based, talent-driven)

It's a true meritocratic system where anyone that actually wants to go make a living for themselves and work hard, there is a very low barrier to entry.

8. incubation [ˌɪŋkjəˈbeɪʃən] - (noun) - The process of developing an idea or project in its initial stages. - Synonyms: (development, cultivation, nurturing)

UberEats had not existed. It was a small incubation in Los Angeles and Toronto.

9. execution [ˌɛksəˈkjuːʃən] - (noun) - The act or process of carrying out or completing something. - Synonyms: (implementation, performance, carrying out)

execution is everything.

10. laborious [ləˈbɔːrɪəs] - (adjective) - Requiring considerable time and effort. - Synonyms: (arduous, tedious, heavy)

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

Building the Next Trillion Dollar Tech Company Revolution

Mike Shebit is on a mission to build the next trillion dollar tech company. And this isn't just some marketing hype. Every single person at his company really believes it. Like literally every single person from an EA all the way up to the CEO. If you ask them, how much is the company gonna be worth to say trillion dollar trend, trillion dollar company, which sounds insane until you're like, oh, wait a second, these people actually believe this? Like, we don't shy away from saying that we were gonna be bigger than Microsoft or Amazon. Like, 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 resurface full productivity and potential.

This 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 two years. But how did he build this so quickly? And could it really be the next trillion dollar company? Well, I sat down with Mike and his team and learned that there are three key strategies that could make Trabas trillion dollar bet a winner.

I'm Mike Shebit, 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, DC, 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 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 car, 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. Basex 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 McMaster car, the engineering supplier.

It was at McMaster car 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. So 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, because I don't have another an option.

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. I got the job at Uber. Uber was just about to launch UberEats. So UberEats had not existed. 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 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 stun 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 one 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, like, what works and what doesn't when building a marketplace product at a three sided marketplace, Uber Eats is harder than, like, a two sided marketplace.

So with McMaster Carr, 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 two 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.

The pandemic has turned economies upside down. The national labor shortage plays a role in the supply chain challenges in the time of Covid-19 that's helping to drive this whole workforce shortage across all industries. Where did all the workers go? Basically, I was at Uber. 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. So I just got super deep on it. 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 they have a telesales operation. 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 McMaster car? They also have actual, like, offices. You have to run an 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 into 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 head workers, you get five. You can't fill the shifts, it takes too long. The quality of workers are terrible. In addition, there's also a long lead time. So you basically have to submit a request for hourly staffing workers, traditionally before trial, but 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 one, like your number one 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. Travis started as a light industrial staffing company serving Miami. That sounds ridiculously niche. But as youll see, starting small is actually the best way to attack the massive global labor market. The staffing industry is a huge industry. Its $520 billion on a global basis, but it just doesnt work. And so if looker 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 workers to download the app. 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, was to recruit an appropriate co founder. He had some ideas about how to go find one. Was he sort of pseudo interviewing people? So he joined an accelerator program called Ondeck in 2020 and met Akshay Boudiga.

Yeah, so I'm Akshay. I'm the co founder and CTO, Eric Trauban, 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 reading it, and obviously it was a very impressive bio. And my girlfriend is reading over my shoulder. She's like, this guy's a winner. You should definitely talk to him. And then that weekend, the next day, they had the first onboarding sessions and all those things. And so one 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 Hawksheh. 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 the idea for Traba.

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 Reboy at Founders fund to meet up and discuss the business. I actually didn't know much about venture capital, despite being in finance before. I found an airtable that had a bunch of investors that were in the Miami region where I was living, and he was one of them. I believe Mike read about it. Mike was already living in Miami and sent me a LinkedIn message. So I said, hey, Keith, I'm like, working at Uber, but I'm building something big. Would love to chat. So I scanned his profile, which had several impressive ingredients, and we went to coffee across the street, and he told me about more about what he does.

That's how I initially met him. He sort of actually refused to tell me about Trauba for months after we became friends, because Keith actually, at the time, I had not really pitched him, but he knew I was working on it. He wanted him to be perfect and, you know, he wanted to have everything, like, perfectly aligned. And then one day we were having coffee and he had his laptop, and he was willing to show me, like, the first time, like a draft on the 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. I ended up meeting Keith as well at that time. So Mike had met Keith, I think, a couple months before that, Okshay was working with me in Miami. We went to dinner with Keith. 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.

Keith had heard the stories about Okshay and the spelling being, and halfway through the dinner, Akshay told me a story. Akshay competed in one 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 as third. But then instead of giving up, he went back the 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 oxid came on board, we refined some materials. We worked with a design agency to just clean it up a bit.

I was in San Francisco at the time, so I flew out to Miami, and I was like, okay, I'm going to work with Mike in person for the next week. And so we did basically a hackathon weekend together. We just worked together for a while. We went and talked to customers. We were in my apartment, 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.

Ended up closing an amazing seed round over the next week or so, with founders son and general catalyst leading that round, we had participated in from village and from Lux Capital. I put in my two weeks at Uber, and, like, 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 immediately got to building. So, like, essentially, like, the scene check hit in, like, August, so two 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 Uberegh.

From his time at UberEaTs, Mike knew that building a marketplace business would be very tricky. You need to match the supply side with the demand side perfectly, or one half of your users will be disappointed. Demand side is the customer. So 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 just guerrilla going into the warehousing district and going door to door, went out to all the warehouses. We went 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 nothing, 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 what we can. We could find out. We put something in front of the customer and see what they. How they react to it. So we, like, coded a prototype of, like, 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, like, a bit more density on the worker side. We had about ten workers that we had met. We met someone on the side of the street. And so we approached him and was like, hey, we have other opportunities on our platform if you're looking for work. He was interested. We got him in a download the app on the spot, and ended up having him work at our first business customer. The next week, 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 the workers after, like, it was very much, like, old school, like that.

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 one business, which is actually one of our. It's a very good business of ours. It's called crayole essence. So they build. They basically, like, create haitian hair care products, and it's a man and his wife. And they were on Shark tank, and 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. Could 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 1 million 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, like just aggressively all hands on deck, everyone, like, calling companies, like, everyone trying their hand at it, us, like, upselling other clients. But it was just like a blitz of, like, 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. The us economy still has a massive labor shortage. Workers are nowhere to be found, 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 matches 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.

It wasn't that Americans didn't want to work. They just wanted to work on their own terms. Ultimately, it was what economists call the labor matching problem. And we saw a similar problem crop up after the 2008 financial crisis. The 2008 crisis, was that part of it? A lot of pieces to it, obviously, but the labor market part was that we had two sectors of the economy, construction and particularly, and then manufacturing, that took a massive hit. And those workers had to figure out what they should do next. And a lot of them sat on the sidelines. They couldn't find anything that that was attractive to them. It was a huge matching problem. You're sitting in Las Vegas and you're not sure whether that you're going to have a job in a week, a month, six months, or a year, and you kind of hope it'll be a week. So you wait and you don't relocate, you don't move, you don't retrain, you don't imagine realistically that this entire industry that you've spent your life in is never going to come back for a long time, at least to the level it was before. And so you don't adjust, and that's a huge problem.

If Traba could help people find new jobs that fit their schedules, their lifestyles, and their economic needs, they'd be able to have a huge impact on people's lives and build a great business in the process. And this highlights Mike's second key strategy. When you find a stagnant industry, leverage technology to deliver a ten x better solution. And this is where the trillion dollar figure starts to look not that insane. For example, right now there are 17 different staffing companies making over $1 billion a year. If they can consolidate that and then expand internationally, they have a good chance of hitting that number, and they already have an advantage.

The labor matching problem is simply too complex to solve with traditional staffing phone banks. But software can make life better for both workers and the companies trying to hire them. So with tribe, you download the app and you just start working. It's a true meritocratic system where anyone that actually wants to go make a living for themselves and work hard, there is a very low barrier to entry. Workers on Traba can build a resume of skills, establish connections to other workers, and essentially prove that they can do a job effectively.

Part of what is broken in the current system is there's no way to actually represent the skills that you have to employers. So whether that's like lifting heavy machinery or like even tiny things like showing up on time, none of that is actually recorded anywhere. So there's no incentive to keep doing that. So trauba being able to record that actually incentivizes workers to start doing this. This allows employers to be more confident about who they're hiring and make sure they have the right number of people show up on a given day through geolocation tracking. The supervisor doesn't have to actually go through this whole process of calling the staffing agency, wondering where the workers are. They also can know, okay, we have ten people here right now, but then five will be here in a little bit.

Technology, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Job Market, Startups, Supply Chain