Friends, 

Traba, a $200 million staffing platform, is one of the most interesting startups in the world right now. 

A few reasons why: 

• They have one of the most opinionated and intense cultures I’ve ever studied. 

• They have an unusual CEO that breaks a few of my mental models around what excellent founders look like. 

• They’re disrupting a massive, unsexy industry with technology. 

• They’re growing fast with great margins and annualized revenue a tick below $7 million. 

• They’ve attracted funding from Tier-1 firms like Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. 

• They’re directly advised by industry heavyweights Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois.

• They openly say that they’re going to become a $1 trillion company. 

After in-office visits, reviewing internal collateral, and interviewing founders, team members, investors, and customers, The Generalist has pieced together the definitive story. Below, you’ll find the case study of a startup taking a radically different approach to team building and hitting a breakout trajectory because of it. I hope you like it.

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Actionable insights

If you only have a few minutes, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Traba.

• Sweat equity. Traba runs one of the startup world’s most unique, unapologetic cultures. The $200 million staffing platform modeled its standards on China’s “9-9-6” schedule, which expects employees to work from 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week. While it has relaxed its policies as it has grown, Traba still counts an “Olympian work ethic” as a key cultural value. 

• Attacking a broken market. If you were designing a market ripe for disruption, it would look quite like global staffing. It is valued at around $600 billion, highly fragmented, and slow to adopt technology. CEO Mike Shebat recognized the opportunity in the space while working at McMaster-Carr and saw the poor reliability existing staffing companies provided. Traba is attacking the opportunity, bringing a tech-first approach to the light industrial staffing segment.

• A pragmatic product. CTO Akshay Buddiga’s team has built a functional, intelligent platform serving businesses in need of workers and the workers themselves. Traba’s technology seems to offer a step-change improvement over incumbents, providing greater visibility, control, and reliability. It also benefits workers, who can discover jobs and get paid much faster. 

• Hitting fast forward. Traba’s solution has found a ready market. In a little over three years, it has approached $7 million in annualized revenue, growing 465% year-over-year. Impressively, it has managed to increase its contribution margins while doing so, hitting 66.2% at the end of last year. There’s a reason why elite investors like Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures have capitalized the startup. 

• Trillion-dollar dreams. Mike Shebat does not want to build a billion-dollar startup. He says, almost as a statement of fact, that Traba will become a trillion-dollar company, joining the ranks of players like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Nvidia. It is an audacious claim with slim odds, but one that says much about the company’s ambition.

A few days before I was scheduled to visit Traba’s office, I texted a friend to cancel our dinner reservation. I told this friend, the founder of a successful New York based company, what was keeping us from steak frites, bone marrow, and perhaps a vodka martini. 

“I am writing this case study on a company called Traba that implements a Chinese-style 996 schedule,” I texted, explaining that I was slated for a late-night office visit at the same time as our dinner. 

He responded quickly: “There’s no way this is possible in NYC.”

That disbelief was the very reason I’d been keen to study Traba, after hearing CEO Mike Shebat on a podcast. Speaking to 20VC’s Harry Stebbings, Shebat had proudly championed his startup’s long hours, “Olympian” work ethic, and mission to build a $1 trillion business. Despite having no previous interest in Traba’s market of light industrial staffing nor familiarity with Shebat’s career, I found myself intrigued by his rhetoric. He was saying something profoundly obvious in one respect – that building an extraordinary company takes extraordinary work – but also transgressive. There are few more efficient routes to an internet argument than to eulogize the 80-hour week. 

In 1997, McKinsey published “The War for Talent,” an assessment of the increasing competition for skilled workers. In the 27 years since its release, the contest has intensified, with the fiercest fighting taking place among tech’s ping-pong tables and cereal bars. We may call it a war, but it is a combat defined not by hardship and deprivation but inducements and abundance. The Apple engineer biking along velvet lawns, the Google PM puttering away in their “20% time,” the Meta designer enjoying a bowl of lightly candied ginger – these are the images piped to us from tech’s frontline. Though perhaps exaggerated, they reflect the consensus strategy of the past decade: to win the best talent, you must offer the most luxurious perks and best “work-life balance.” Demand too much and you risk losing the cerebration and sweat of the employee you worked so hard to convert. 

Traba is taking a different approach. While peers and forebearers emulate the decadence of a banal, patronizing Rome, Shebat is aiming for something closer to Sparta. Intensity, effort, sweat – these are not the unsavory byproducts of building a company; they are the end, in and of themselves. “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things,” the poet Ranier Marie Rilke wrote. Above all, this seems to be Traba’s pitch: tech’s best talent wants a mountain to climb, not a nap pod.

It has invited its fair share of criticism. Any time Traba’s culture is mentioned on social media, a catalog of outraged commentary follows. The more hysterical suggest that Traba’s expectations are “bordering slavery” – a great affront to those actually forced to work against their volition rather than by choice in a decent if unflashy Broadway office. Others insist Shebat’s methodology must lead to unhappy employees, high turnover, and burnout, as if it were a law of the natural world. 

As someone who spent a miserable, braindead year working 60-plus hour weeks at a law firm (a light jog by investment banking standards), I, too, felt some skepticism. Could a startup promising punishing hours attract and retain great talent? Could they convince employees to sit at a desk 12 hours a day surrounded by the world’s most hyperactive city? How much of Shebat’s patter was a marketing ruse, a sort of machismo, the commercial equivalent of a college classmate that brags about the number of all-nighters they pulled during finals week? 

Beneath any apprehension, however, was another sensation: excitement. Even among the startup world’s many bold CEOs, Shebat stood out for his brazenness and audacity. As much as his declamations might have been the signs of a skilled showman, they could have just as easily portended a founder with the uncommon ambition and grit needed to build something truly special. I had to find out which of those stories were true. 

On a bank holiday Monday in February at 7:00 PM, I stepped off an elevator and into Traba’s office. 

“I didn’t know that was humanly possible.”

Over the past quarter of a century, few have had as successful an operating and investing career as Keith Rabois. Since starting at PayPal as an Executive Vice President at the turn of the millennium, the Khosla Ventures partner has founded, managed, and invested in a slew of billion-dollar businesses, including LinkedIn, Square, Faire, Opendoor, OpenStore, Affirm, Ramp, and DoorDash. It is a track record that marks Rabois as one of the most gifted pickers of his generation.

As a result, when Rabois says that Mike Shebat might be the most persistent person he’s ever met, my ears prick up. This is a man who has counted Elon Musk and Vinod Khosla as co-workers. He has invested in Patrick and John Collison, Max Levchin, and Tony Xu. None are renowned for their wilting personalities or Wonderbread spines.

Why? I ask Rabois. What is it about Mike?

Mike Shebat was born in Northern Virginia, straight into a competition. “I have a twin brother, Chris. He was six minutes older, so he’s the eldest son and I’m the second eldest,” Shebat said. Though just a few hundred seconds separated him from his brother, Mike spent much of his childhood feeling like he trailed by a much greater distance. “My brother was very good at any sport he did, he got into the Gifted & Talented program in elementary before I did. My parents put us into basketball, soccer, baseball, football – all the sports – and he always outshone me. As a young child, I developed a chip on my shoulder.”

Talking to Shebat in the present day, such stories seem incongruous with his imposing, broad-shouldered presence. Though he is quick to smile and easy to speak with, he has an aura of inherent competence that makes him seem like a character lifted from an Ayn Rand book – Hank Rearden with an Equinox membership. It is impossible to imagine him struggling, especially athletically. 

The one place Mike stepped out of his brother’s shadow was the swimming pool. His success owed at least as much to his desire to surpass Chris as natural aptitude. “My dad brought me to the YMCA one time and he was like, ‘Oh, you could actually be a good swimmer.’ So I basically went all in on swimming. I was waking up at 4 AM before school, swimming constantly. I became a really good swimmer and broke records on my summer league team.”

Even that narrow spotlight, earned with endless laps, didn’t last. Though Mike eclipsed his marginally older brother in the pool, his younger brother soon surpassed him. “I was well regarded as a pretty great swimmer. But then my little brother became an amazing swimmer.” John Shebat would go on to become an NCAA champion at the University of Texas and compete at the Olympic Trials.

Though Mike Shebat’s brothers provided direct competition, his parents provided the need to compete in the first place. “[Mike’s drive] does derive from his family, primarily through his mother,” Rabois said. “She set the foundation very strongly when he was young that there’s a right and wrong way to do things. There’s a Shebat family way to do things.” If a young Mike forgot to make his bed in the morning, his mother wouldn’t let it sit until he got home. “I have memories of my mom literally coming into school and taking me out of class to go make it,” Mike told me.

That’s not to say that Shebat’s father was a soft touch. Mike described him as delivering a “hard edge” and demanding “very high standards.” Afternoons were filled with one hour of piano practice, one hour of reading, and zero hours of screen time. From an early age, the Shebat children were expected to take care of their laundry and help clean. “I was raised with no excuses,” Shebat says. “It was a very disciplined environment.” 

Upstaged by his siblings athletically, Mike directed his competitive energy toward school. While that helped him stand out in high school, receiving admission to the University of Virginia, he hit his stride during his years in Charlottesville. After recreating the rigid schedule of his childhood, Shebat found scholastic success naturally followed. “I was like, ‘Wow, I can get straight As if I just put in the inputs and focus.’” For Shebat, it validated a broader philosophy: “Inputs drive outputs. You don’t just get outputs in a miraculous way. You have to do things consistently, not give up, and eventually, you can outwork the competition.”

If industry was the central premise of Shebat’s outlook, it was swiftly followed by uncompromising ambition. When it came to his professional goals, Shebat showed an unwillingness to take no for an answer and a talent for finding alternate routes to his desired destination. As a junior at UVA’s Arts and Sciences school, he was dismayed to discover that his dream employer, Goldman Sachs, didn’t recruit for its investment banking practice at his school. Rather than look at other companies, Shebat learned of a Goldman trip to hire from the university’s Commerce School, finagling himself an interview.

Getting in the room was the easy part; the real challenge would be out-competing the many business undergraduates who had spent weeks preparing. “I could just tell by the lay of the land that I had to find a way to get noticed,” Shebat recalled. “I also know that in highly competitive environments – like getting an internship or building a startup – you have to be different than the middle of the Bell Curve to stand out. When you leave an interview, [recruiters] can probably say three sentences about you, and if they’re very similar, you’re just going to blend in.”

Years later, that lesson would stand him in good stead. 

To separate himself from the pack, Shebat put his economics major to good use, discussing the differences between the discipline’s Austrian and Keynesian philosophies. He sealed his pitch by emphasizing that if Goldman bet on him, they wouldn’t regret it. “Before I left the room, I was like, ‘Look, if I were to leave you with something, it’s that I promise you I will deliver. I’ve delivered in anything that I do. I will do whatever it takes to succeed here.’” Shebat spent his summer on Wall Street. 

In the end, Shebat didn’t last long in high finance. He joined Blackstone after graduation but quickly yearned for a more hands-on career. “I was like, ‘Ok, in order to develop as a high-potential leader, I need to learn how to manage people, I need to learn how to motivate and inspire people.’ I wanted an environment that was heavily operational, where I could learn all the different parts of the company. That’s when McMaster-Carr reached out.”

McMaster-Carr is one of the quiet giants of American industry. Though unheralded in tech, the 123-year-old private firm sells 700,000 products, from pens and paper to air-powered nail guns and welding torches. As much as McMaster boasts an impressive breadth of supply, its depth is even more remarkable. It does not simply sell screws; it sells 78,576 “Fastening and Joining” items, searchable by thread size, length, material, finish, head type, hardness, tensile strength, and about a dozen other dimensions. 

Shebat’s stint at McMaster gave him a taste of what it meant to be a builder, albeit at a larger, less nimble incumbent. More importantly, it introduced him to the light industrial staffing market. When an enterprise customer placed a large order with McMaster, the supplier spun up temporary teams to manage the fulfillment process from packing and labeling to lifting and loading. Rather than try to find short-term workers themselves, McMaster relied on staffing agencies. 

In theory, these companies should quickly and reliably source laborers and place them at companies that need them. In practice, Shebat discovered a different story. These businesses were neither fast nor reliable. It was routine for agencies to take seven days to hire a team, making it difficult for clients like McMaster to respond to customer demand swiftly. When agencies finally managed to assemble a team, it was usually heavily understaffed, with an industry-wide “fill rate” of just 46%. Meaning that if McMaster was looking for a hundred workers, the data suggested they would receive just 46 of them for the job.

In the years to come, Shebat would learn that industrial staffing’s deficiencies ran down to the bedrock. “There’s no system of record,” he said. “There’s no way to invite back workers, there’s no way to vet the workers' skills. Can they stack fifty-pound boxes? Or are they more attentive to detail and want to do more labeling and things like that.” The market was broken, but McMaster-Carr wasn’t the company to fix it. 

By 2016, Shebat was ready for a new challenge. Ever since taking an undergraduate class at UVA that encouraged students to build “a fake company,” he knew he wanted to start a firm of his own. But for the first time in a while, he wasn’t sure of the best next step. Should he go to business school and expand his network? Or try his hand at a faster growth startup? 

Though unsure of his desire to get an MBA, Shebat threw himself into the process with trademark intensity. When I asked Keith Rabois why the Traba CEO was the most persistent person he’d ever met, this was the anecdote he pointed to first. “He took the GMAT seven times,” Rabois said. “I didn’t even know that was humanly possible,” chuckling as he shared the anecdote.

As it turns out, Rabois was wrong. Mike Shebat didn’t take the GMAT seven times, searching for his best possible score. He took it eight. According to Shebat and several test prep websites, that is the lifetime limit. “I got a better score every time!!” Shebat said via text. “Went up over 250 points from start to finish. Leave everything on the field and pull every single lever possible to succeed. That way no regrets.” As Rabois said of Shebat’s GMAT prep, “That’s pretty much how he approaches everything. Once you see that characteristic, you start seeing it everywhere.”

If you were a hyper-intense Blackstone alum with a minor in ambition, there were few better places to go in 2016 than Uber. If you had to choose a year as Uber’s pinnacle, this was it. This was the Uber of Travis Kalanick and toe-stepping; the Uber that courted Saudi Arabia and left with $3.5 billion; the Uber slated to win food delivery and autonomous driving; the Uber before #DeleteUber, the Holder investigation, and Dara Khosrowshahi. It was, simply put, the Uberiest version of Uber. For a brief moment, it seemed the best way to traverse the globe was by black car. 

When a recruiter reached out to Shebat, he quickly jumped aboard, joining the insurgent Uber Eats division. Over the next five and a half years, Shebat witnessed the company’s hard-charging culture, operational excellence, and management of extreme turbulence. He delivered iPads in the Texas heat to try and onboard restaurants to the Eats program, moved to Mexico and Brazil to launch international markets, and learned to set his sights ever higher. “[I remember when I met] Travis Kalanick, I asked, ‘What kind of books are you reading?’ And he’s like, I’m reading about Rockefeller.’ I was like, ‘That’s so inspiring, he’s dreaming big.’”

Shebat worked relentlessly. “I love what I do, I don’t really see it as work. Even when I was at Uber, I worked all the time. Because I enjoy it, I enjoy trying to get better.” Shebat’s enjoyment extended to the most stressful aspects of the job. “What better way to learn than to be thrown in and have to solve problems every day. Kind of like a math professor – a math professor without any problems to solve is not a very happy math professor.” 

A variable compensation package spurred his drive. “From Travis, another thing I learned is I remember being so motivated by knowing you can either make no bonus or like a crazy high number. It was all meritocratic,” he said, describing how Uber reviewed performance data to categorize employees in one of six zones. “If you get slotted in zone six, you could make real numbers, like six-figures. Zone five, it was a big drop to like $30,000. Then zone four, it’s like $15,000, then zone three – then it goes into almost nothing, like $5,000 or $2,000. That’s a huge spread. But because of that, everyone wanted a zone six and would work really hard for zone six.”

While Shebat ultimately didn’t introduce that system at Traba (“we don’t have huge numbers of people…and that system did have its flaws”), it provided an interesting lesson on aligning and motivating a large workforce. By 2020, he was ready to take those lessons and apply them to a challenge of his own making. 

“May I have the definition, please?”

“Alopecoid?” 

Standing in front of the microphone is a boy in a white polo emblazoned with the National Spelling Bee badge. He is thirteen but looks three years younger. 

“Alopecoid,” a man in a tan suit intones toward the stage. 

“May I have the definition, please?” 

“Like a fox, vulpine. Alopecoid.”

The child ponders, glancing at his feet. “Alopecoid. May I have the language of origin?”

The boy is Akshay Buddiga, an eighth grader from Colorado Springs. He has come to the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC, not merely to compete but to win. Since seeing his older brother seize the title two years prior, he has sworn to himself that he will equal the feat. After finishing a disappointing eighth in his state the year before, this is his last chance.

Agonizing pauses punctuate that question and those that follow. Then something happens. Buddiga’s eyes go wide and suddenly he is pitching to his left, out of shot, tumbling onto the stage floor. “Oh my god!” a worried voice exclaims. “We’ve never seen this before,” the announcer says, “The poor gentleman, the young man, apparently has fainted on stage.”

Buddiga cuts short concerns, rising quickly and stepping back to the microphone. He begins to spell: “A-l-o-p-e-c-o-i-d. Alopecoid.”

Twenty years on, Akshay Buddiga reflected on that moment and what was going through his mind. “I was going back and forth between two ways to spell it,” Traba’s Chief Technical Officer said. “And I ended up locking my knees and fainting. I fell down, I got back up, and I was like, ‘I’m just gonna go and spell it. Whatever happens happens.’ So I went back up and spelled and they didn’t ring the buzzer, so I knew it was right.’”

In the end, Buddiga would finish second in the tournament, falling short of his goal. But in the years since, his fall and recovery have become a part of Spelling Bee lore, re-airing on ESPN and attracting hundreds of thousands of YouTube views. It also neatly encapsulates Traba’s other founder. Though Buddiga cuts a milder figure than Shebat, there is no doubt he shares similar intensity and perseverance. 

During my early interactions with Traba’s founders, Buddiga said little and yet there was a kind of eloquence in his silence. When he spoke, he did so with the poise of someone who spent much of their life studying the English language’s long tail. Though much of Traba’s previous coverage focuses on Shebat and his ambitious goals, Buddiga is indispensable. He is a “genius” by his co-founder’s estimation, and the key to ensuring Traba succeeds as a true tech business rather than a modernized staffing firm.

Buddiga’s journey from Spelling Bee sensation to tech CTO followed the path of many an overachiever. He attended Duke University after shining in high school, beginning his time in Durham as a biomedical engineering major. At least in part, that focus was an attempt to carve a career distinct from his father, an experienced network engineer. The slowness of the younger Buddiga’s chosen field eventually dissuaded him from pursuing life in a laboratory, guiding him toward the more rapid, iterative world of software. A Master’s in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford allowed Buddiga to strengthen his skills and add business acumen. 

A Product Operations role at Zenefits followed, where he got to experience the benefits and drawbacks of hockey stick growth. “The company had just raised a Series B and was scaling insanely fast,” Buddiga recalled. “At the time, it was the fastest-growing B2B company in Silicon Valley history or something like that. It was a boot camp for hyper-growth, essentially.” His 16 months under founder and then-CEO Parker Conrad left him with an appreciation for startups and the intensity it took to win. “After that experience, I was like, ‘Startups are great.’ They’re a kind of insane experience to go through.”

If Zenefits was about speed, Buddiga’s five years at Fanatics focused on scale. He joined the sports apparel manufacturer and retailer to help it rebuild its tech stack from scratch to enable global scale. “It was a really interesting technical opportunity,” Buddiga said, though he knew it wouldn’t be a permanent resting place. When the CTO asked Buddiga during the recruitment process where he hoped to be in five years, Buddiga responded, “I want to start a company.”

By 2020, he and his team succeeded in their mission. “We accomplished all the goals we set out to do – we went global, did multi-language and multi-currency, launched in Europe and Japan, did all that stuff,” he said. Buddiga’s successes at Fanatics set him up to take the entrepreneurial leap he’d forecasted in his interviews. It is an indication of his methodical nature that he did not rush to take that next step. 

In late fall that year, Buddiga took a solo hike in Marin County, an idyllic patch on the west side of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. He used the walk to clear his head and ask himself what he wanted from his life. “I journaled and wrote some stuff down,” he recalled. “I basically thought about it from the regret minimization perspective. [I asked myself,] ‘If I look back five or ten years from now, or even from my deathbed, which of these options am I going to regret more? If I start a company and it fails, am I going to regret not working at an early-stage startup somewhere?’ I was like, ‘Not really, because I’ll just join another one.’” It was November 3, 2020 – election day in America. A day of decisions.

Becoming an entrepreneur is not as simple as choosing to be one. If Buddiga were going to fulfill his ambitions, he would need an idea and, perhaps, a business partner. To accelerate the process, he joined On Deck, an online accelerator and provider of virtual courses. It immediately delivered. In the days leading up to the program’s kick-off events, participants were encouraged to post introductions in Slack, outlining their professional backgrounds and ambitions. “Everyone is writing these long, amazing breakdowns,” Buddiga remembered. “All these super talented people – crazy backgrounds, amazing experiences. People that have started a company, sold companies.” As Buddiga scrolled, his fiance watched over his shoulder, silently assessing. When he reached a post written by someone named Mike Shebat, she stopped him: “This guy’s a winner. You should definitely talk to him.”

“The whole space is literally broken.”

Shebat didn’t rush his departure from Uber. Before taking a swing at entrepreneurship, he would ensure he was as prepared as possible. During the sourdough and sweatpants days of the pandemic, Shebat decided it was time he learned about venture capital. “I took a Kauffman Fellows class. And then I also read a book called Venture Deals. Honestly, I think there was probably too much detail in both of those.”

He also began digging into the market he’d observed at McMaster-Carr. Was the industrial staffing process really as broken as it had appeared to be? And even if it was, could a generational company be built to address its many ostensible problems? The more Shebat learned, the greater his conviction grew. 

He discovered that hiring was, indeed, a large and acute problem. In 2022, the global staffing market was estimated at $648 billion. Despite some dips, the segment grew at a compound annual growth rate of 4.2% between 2008 and 2022. (The available figures for 2023 appear slightly more variable and less reliable.) The US market was estimated to be worth $219 billion in 2022, with the industrial segment pegged at $37.1 billion. In the years before the pandemic, staffing supplied job opportunities for 16 million Americans – experiencing a downturn during lockdown. 

Companies like McMaster-Carr spent millions of dollars a year on temporary industrial workers, relying on legacy providers. He found a slew of staffing agencies clearing a billion dollars or more in annual revenue, indicating the market’s size and fragmentation. An independent report suggests that as many as 60 companies earned $100 million or more in revenue from US operations. The industry’s three biggest players – Randstad, Adecco, and Manpower – comprise a mere 12% of the market.

In Shebat’s view, these companies had managed to clip nine-figure earnings with sub-standard offerings, failing to meet customer demand and insufficiently vetting workers. “The real thing that makes you good or bad [at one of these jobs] is like, ‘Can you show up to work on time? Can you actually work hard while you’re in the facility? Can you not get in fights with people? Can you be polite, have a good attitude? Can you lift heavy things? Do you have attention to detail?’ [There’s] a lack of control and transparency.” 

The system worked little better for the temps themselves. “There used to be a dynamic in the United States where you go work for Pepsi-Cola and you’re there for 30 years and you get a pension, you can retire. That’s just not how things work anymore,” Shebat said. “There’s not really a career path. You’re stacking boxes until you don’t. And then maybe you can manage others.” 

The lack of information about temporary workers hurts not only businesses but also the workers themselves. An excellent reputation putting in the hours at one warehouse isn’t transferred to another, making it difficult to rise through the ranks or earn rewards for your efforts. It’s also difficult to know what a given environment will be like before showing up. “Say you find out this warehouse facility down the block pays more, you show up, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, it’s so hot in here.’ They don’t turn on the air conditioning, the supervisor’s selling drugs, someone is doing shady things. It’s really hard. Long story short, the whole space is literally broken.” Mike Shebat joined the On Deck program in 2021 to bring his idea for a tech-forward light industrial staffing platform to life. He would call it Traba. 

After meeting in the early days of the On Deck program, Shebat and Akshay Buddiga approached the possibility of partnering up with reasonable caution. Buoyed by the adrenaline of a new idea, it is easy for founders to pair off too quickly, jumping into a marriage doomed to fail from the beginning. To reduce their chances of a future divorce, the pair talked through their different ambitions, working styles, and decision-making processes. They walked through potential black swan episodes and edge cases – how would they handle them? 

In the course of their dating process, the topic of work ethic arose. What did they expect of each other? What did they expect of themselves? “Both of us were very much aligned that this [business] was going to be the primary focus of our lives,” Buddiga said. “In order to build something massive that’s going to make a huge impact on the world, you need to put everything into it.” Though they didn’t have neat slogans to summarize their commitment, the message was clear: Shebat and Buddiga would build a generational business or burn themselves to cider trying. 

It was finally time for Shebat to leave Uber and Traba to raise a seed round. With typical farsightedness, Shebat had begun wooing venture capitalists months earlier. After downloading an Airtable listing of active investors in his new hometown of Miami, he started reaching out to them, setting up meetings. Not all were productive. 

“I did meet with a lot of investors before I met with Keith and a lot of them were not that nice,” Shebat recalled. “I’d meet with one of them, he’d give me homework to do, it was a weird environment. Then he'd whisk away in his BMW down to Brickell.”

Shebat’s outreach to Rabois, then at Founders Fund, proved much more productive. It also offers an example of what a good cold outreach strategy looks like. “I went to Keith’s Twitter,” Shebat said. “Top of funnel for any sale is, ‘Who is my customer?’ I saw that he’s really into Barry’s and I’m really into Barry’s too. So I reached out to him on LinkedIn and instead of being like, ‘Let’s get coffee’ – I’m sure he gets reached out to for coffee every day – I was like, ‘Let’s do a Barry’s class.’ And, of course, he would say yes because he goes every single day.” 

After sweating through squats and bicep curls, Rabois and Shebat went to a coffee shop to talk. The then-Uber employee played the long game. “I never really mentioned Traba, I just talked broadly like, ‘Hey, what do you do for work?’ Just getting to know him better. I never really pitched Traba until like six months later.”

Over the following months, Shebat built a friendship with Rabois and broadened his venture network, attending industry events in Miami. “I was at the right place at the right time,” he said. “This was early 2021, Miami was open and a lot of venture capitalists and people were in Miami. That’s how I met Katherine Boyle (then an investor at General Catalyst, today a General Partner at a16z). Then I was invited to Peter Thiel’s house for dinner at some point. I got to know these people at a high level without really pitching.”

What would Shebat say at these events if he didn’t discuss his idea? “When I was introducing myself to people, I was like, ‘Hey, I’m in product at Uber, but I’m going to be building something big eventually. I’m not going to talk about it right now. But that’s basically where my head’s at.’” 

Shebat’s preparation meant that when it was time to raise, the process moved swiftly. Rabois remembered his response when Shebat walked through Traba’s deck at their next coffee meeting. “My first reaction was a great sigh of relief,” Rabois said. “You’re friends with somebody and they’re alluding to starting a company and hopefully they're going to work on something interesting. But you don’t always know.” Thankfully for both of them, that wasn’t the case. “The first draft was extremely strong.”

Four points in particular resonated with Rabois, outside of the tenacity and seriousness he’d already observed in Shebat. Firstly, Traba was attacking a large market – “significantly larger than my intuition or anyone’s intuition,” he said. Secondly, large businesses had been built in the space, but all seemed “defective or broken down.” Thirdly, none of those players had significant market share. And finally, Shebat’s time at McMaster-Carr and Uber meant he had the ideal resumé. “As soon as he connected the dots for me, I was like, ‘Ok, this is a great market opportunity and you’re very well suited to do this.’”

In July 2021, Traba raised a $3.6 million seed, co-led by Founders Fund and General Catalyst. Not long after, Shebat and Buddiga enjoyed a moment of sweet revenge. The venture capitalists with the BMW that had strung them along for months arrived at the Founders Fund office one day to find the pair ensconced in their work. “He walks in and he’s like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Shebat recalled. “And Akshay and I are like, ‘Oh, yeah we got an investment from Founders Fund.’” Faced with an obstacle in his path, Shebat had found another, better side door.

“Dream Big”

Before I can even get into the elevator, someone from Traba has introduced themselves. They’re returning to work after a short trip to grab food or perhaps a final boost of caffeine. We chat for a moment as we ride up to the fourth floor. 

It is 7:00 PM on President’s Day and the office is full. Employees sit or stand at their desks, gently illuminated by a purple neon “Traba” sign. I do not want to oversell it. It is not some frenetic, boiling cauldron of Hufflepuff energy, sales team striking a gong, engineers arguing over a vertical monitor, a sole product manager karate chopping through a stack of bricks. It is an ordinary scene, except for the hour. People are working, there is brisk chatter, meetings fill a few of the rooms. 

I am in the place for no more than thirty seconds before several employees come up and introduce themselves, full of friendly energy. For a moment, this throws me. Why are they so prepared? Has Traba constructed this tableau for my benefit? Have I walked into a Potemkin startup?

Such is the writer’s ego. There are no signs of trick walls, and if this is a performance, the performance seems to be: build a great startup for the next twenty years or more.

For the next two hours, I sit in a conference room and talk with Mike Shebat and Akshay Buddiga. We walk through their latest board deck, cultural tenets, and stories up to this point. We discuss the investors they have worked with and how they rely on them. They are frank with their numbers and how they operate. For fifteen minutes, Shebat recounts a recent all-hands meeting in which he explained why Traba had let a few underperforming team members go. In several of these moments, I am struck by how crisp a communicator Shebat seems to be, finding a way to compress complicated trade-offs into clear, persuasive language.

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Puzzler

All guesses are welcome and clues given to anyone that would like one. Just respond to this email for a hint.

Where can you finish a book without finishing a sentence?

Congratulations to Michael O, Shashwat N, Bruce G, and Nick T for solving our last little conundrum. Here it is: 

How do you make the number one disappear?

The answer? Add the letter “g” and turn “one” into “gone.” A sneaky one! 

See you soon,

Mario