The number 10 is soccer's invitation to interfere with geometry. A midfielder in that shirt is expected to find lanes that look closed, arrive where a defense has forgotten to look and make somebody else's run suddenly sensible. Gonzalo De Mujica wore it at Stetson University. Across four seasons he played 74 matches, scored 18 goals and supplied 20 assists. Years later, working inside a young company trying to make industrial staffing less erratic, the field was different. The assignment was curiously familiar.
At Traba, De Mujica became the person near the center of early customer relationships. He joined in September 2021 as part of the founding team, when the company was still learning how its promise would survive contact with warehouses, production floors and the ordinary chaos of a shift change. He helped close early customers. As the company grew, he mentored people in go-to-market and customer operations. The old midfielder had moved indoors, but he was still connecting one side to another.
The education of number 10
De Mujica was born in Buenos Aires in 1990 and came of age in South Florida, attending Cypress Bay High School in Weston. By his senior year he had collected 25 goals and 26 assists, earned local player-of-the-year recognition and helped his team reach the state final. He also competed in track and field, a useful footnote for anyone tempted to imagine midfield intelligence as a substitute for running.
At Stetson, where he studied International Business, his first college appearance offered a compact preview: one goal and two assists. As a freshman he led the Hatters in scoring. By his senior season he again had seven assists, alongside five goals, and was named First Team All-Atlantic Sun. He also earned regional and Scholar All-American recognition. Upon graduation, his academic record put him on the conference's Commissioner Scholar list.
The numbers tell a balanced story. Eighteen goals mean he could end a move. Twenty assists mean he could recognize who should end it instead. The second number is the more revealing one. Goals receive the photograph; assists reveal an appetite for sequence, timing and other people's success.
“Our goal is to ultimately be a team of the community, where our senior team is mostly homegrown talent.”Gonzalo De Mujica, on Miami FC's academy pathway
Professional, then useful in a new way
After college came the conventional test. De Mujica had played summer and development seasons with Central Florida Kraze, FC JAX Destroyers and Orlando City U-23. In 2013 he signed with the Fort Lauderdale Strikers of the North American Soccer League. His professional debut arrived on May 18 in San Antonio, when he entered in the 72nd minute. He appeared for the Strikers over two seasons.
A professional playing career is brutally legible. A roster has a fixed number of places. A match keeps time in public. The sporting life supplies very little cover for vague effort, which may be why former athletes tend to recognize the difference between motion and progress. De Mujica's next phase kept him in soccer while moving him toward the machinery around it.
At Miami FC he worked as a coach and community promoter, explaining in 2017 that his job included talking with local clubs and giving children a connection to professional soccer. By 2020 he was director of the youth academy, arguing for a route by which academy players could train with, and perhaps eventually play for, the senior team. The idea was not merely to discover talent. It was to design a path talent could actually travel.
In 2021, the club's media guide listed him as senior manager of business development. That progression - player, coach and promoter, academy director, business developer - looks less like leaving the field than steadily widening it. Each job pulled another constituency into view: young players, parents, local clubs, sponsors, executives. The work became less visible and more connective.
The September transfer
On September 15, 2021, De Mujica announced another move. “I'm excited to announce that I will be joining Traba as part of the founding team,” he wrote. He thanked Mike Shebat, Akshay Buddiga, Luis Enrique Lasso De La Lastra and Isabel Avery by name, then described the role in two directions at once: an opportunity to learn and a chance to take the company forward.
Traba had started that year with a stubborn problem. Light-industrial employers need people for warehouse, distribution and production shifts, often quickly. The traditional process could be slow, the information thin and the outcome uncertain. Traba set out to use a worker app, an operating platform and performance data to match businesses with workers more reliably. It began in South Florida, practically on De Mujica's home turf.
The company's public founding history centers on Shebat and Buddiga as co-founders. De Mujica's designation was different and specific: founding team, with a current title of Founder, Operations & Strategy. That distinction matters because early companies are built not only by the people who frame the thesis, but by the people who make it work on a Tuesday afternoon for a skeptical first customer.
That was where De Mujica left his mark. Four years after he joined, Shebat credited him with setting the tone for customer obsession from the beginning, closing some of Traba's earliest customers and mentoring the next wave of go-to-market and customer operations staff. It is a description of an operator who helped a company acquire memory: how to listen, what to promise, where an apparently simple request will snag and whom to call before it does.
Four Stetson seasons, ending with all-conference, all-region and Scholar All-American honors.
Professional midfielder for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers.
Community, academy and senior business-development work at Miami FC.
Founding operations and strategy work at Traba.
Reliability is a human metric
There is a neatness to the athlete-to-startup story that ought to make a reader suspicious. Startups enjoy sports metaphors because scoreboards make uncertainty look tidy. Business is rarely so courteous. Customers change their minds. Workers have lives outside the shift. Software meets forklifts, traffic and weather. The whistle does not reliably arrive after 90 minutes.
Yet Traba's product brings the comparison back to earth. In staffing, showing up is not a metaphor. A missing worker can slow a line, leave orders unfilled or force everyone present to absorb the gap. Reliability belongs to systems, but it also belongs to people: the worker who arrives, the operator who checks, the customer lead who warns the team that tomorrow will be different.
De Mujica's career has kept returning to institutions that organize human movement. A midfield does it for 22 players. An academy does it across ages and ambitions. A staffing operation attempts it across companies, shifts, skills and neighborhoods. The scale changes. The need to notice individuals does not.
His public profile lists English and Spanish at native or bilingual proficiency, with working Portuguese as well. In South Florida, on soccer fields and inside a labor marketplace, that is not decorative fluency. It shortens distance. The work of an operator is often presented as a taste for process. It is just as often the ability to hear where the process is failing someone.
A goal ends the move. An assist proves you saw the move before it ended.
Four years, one crowded room
In September 2025, Traba marked De Mujica's fourth anniversary alongside Javier Rodriguez. The tribute remembered early team meetings squeezed into one Brickell conference room. Such details are the correct antidote to startup mythology. Before the national ambition, before the funding announcements and the growing headcount, there are too many people in a room and a customer waiting for an answer.
The company had changed considerably by then. It had expanded beyond its South Florida beginning, raised institutional funding and described a mission that reached across the industrial supply chain. De Mujica's role had changed too. The person once brought in to help carry the work was now mentoring others who would carry it further.
That is the quiet arc of the story. He did not trade competition for administration, nor sport for a safer abstraction. He moved from one form of coordination to another, keeping close to customers, workers and teammates. His résumé contains two kinds of playing career, and the hinge between them is not celebrity or luck. It is usefulness.
A number 10 is judged by what happens after the pass. So is a founding operator. The ball leaves the foot, the plan leaves the meeting, the shift begins. Then reality answers. De Mujica has spent his working life near that answer, adjusting his position and looking up for whoever is open.