Mike Shebat

The problem Shebat is trying to solve is embarrassingly boring. A distribution center in Ohio needs forty forklift-certified workers at 6 a.m. Historically, it calls a staffing agency, the staffing agency promises forty, and something like sixteen show up. Shifts start late, orders slip, and the plant manager writes an angry email that no one answers because the person who was supposed to answer is the one who did not show up.

Traba is the software layer over that mess. Workers download an app, get vetted, verify their skills, and pick shifts the way rideshare drivers pick trips. Employers get a dashboard, a rating system, and, in theory, forty for forty. It is not a novel idea. Uber Work-For-A-Shift had a version. Instawork and Wonolo have versions. What Shebat has, and what Founders Fund apparently bought, is an unusually operational take on it - and a co-founder who used to run engineering problems at speed.

Shebat did not start in staffing. He started, like a lot of ambitious UVA econ majors from the class of 2014, on a track toward finance. He interned at the U.S. Treasury, then at Goldman Sachs, then landed at Blackstone as a hedge fund analyst, writing seeding cases for hedge funds over $100 million and briefing C-level executives. It was the correct career for the resume. It was also the career he chose to leave.

He left Blackstone for McMaster-Carr, which sells industrial parts, has a legendary internal culture, and does not typically show up on the escape hatches out of finance. Shebat entered its management rotation program and ended up supervising 36 people in the shipping division. He redesigned the shipping process and, according to his own account, saved the operation roughly $450,000 a year. He also watched, up close, how staffing worked when the volume varied and the humans were unreliable. That is the origin footage for Traba.

Between McMaster and Traba came Uber. Shebat joined in 2016 and helped launch Uber Eats in sixteen markets, then worked on Uber Rewards. Uber is where a certain generation of operators went to learn what marketplace liquidity actually feels like from the inside - how a small change in an incentive alters a supply curve you can see move by the hour. That plus a McMaster-Carr shipping floor is a specific and unusual combination.

How Traba Started

The founding story is short. In 2021, Shebat joined On Deck, the online founders program. In the introductory session he met Akshay Buddiga, a former Kleiner Perkins investor and Vise engineer who would become Traba's co-founder and CTO. They found the same problem interesting for related reasons - Buddiga had a background in engineering marketplaces at scale; Shebat had, as he put it in interviews, seen fewer than half of assigned temp workers actually walk through the door.

Traba launched in July 2021 in South Florida, with a couple thousand workers and a couple dozen customers. Khosla Ventures led the Series A the next year at around $20 million. Founders Fund led the next round in October 2023 at $22 million, with Keith Rabois publicly out front on the deal. Shebat and Rabois recorded an episode of 20VC together shortly after the round closed. It is a useful episode because Shebat, unusually, does not deflect on the culture questions.

The Culture, Stated Plainly

Most founders soften the office schedule when a microphone is on. Shebat, in his conversation with Rabois, did the opposite. Twelve hours a day, Monday through Thursday, in the office. Ten on Friday. Reachable on weekends. No side projects. His argument was not that this is right for every company - it was that this is what Traba is, and that clarity up front is a kindness to people deciding whether to join.

The other argument on that podcast was more contrarian: first-time founders, Shebat said, are better than serial entrepreneurs. Serial founders know too much about what's hard. First-timers try things that don't work, and occasionally the things that don't work do. Traba is not the argument by itself - but it is Shebat's argument by example.

What the Business Actually Does

Traba's product is two apps and a data pool. On the worker side there is an app for finding shifts, tracking earnings, checking skill certifications, and handling geotracked clock-ins. On the employer side there is a console for ordering workers by role and shift, watching real-time fill rates, and rating people afterward. The data pool is the point: over time Traba builds a picture of which workers are reliable, which are skilled, which are within reasonable driving distance of a given site.

The list of roles Traba fills is mostly the unglamorous parts of the physical economy: warehouse associates, forklift operators, order pickers, packagers, distribution center workers. The company's marketing materials list the usual staffing menu - permanent placement support, direct hire, seasonal staffing, project-based staffing, high-volume staffing. What is different, in principle, is the software underneath, and the fact that the workers rate the employers back.

The Career Backwards

Careers make more sense in reverse. In Shebat's case the through-line is that he kept trading prestige for operations. Treasury and Goldman were for the resume. Blackstone was the correct next step. McMaster-Carr was the first strange one - the kind of job Ivy-adjacent finance kids do not normally take - and it was where the founding insight arrived. Uber was where he learned to move a marketplace. Traba is the essay that cites all three sources.

Details That Don't Fit in the Deck

A few small things are worth knowing about Shebat that will not appear in a pitch deck. He got serious about starting a company in a UVA course called Strategies of Entrepreneurship, where he and classmates built a concept for a mobile app that would offer virtual reality tours of historic sites. The app did not get funded. The habit did.

Traba is named to evoke the Spanish word trabajo, which means work. This is the sort of naming choice that reads as either charming or over-considered depending on your priors about founders. Shebat's Twitter handle is @mike_sheb. The company's handle is @traba_work.

The colleague who described him in the UVA alumni feature - Nazer Hasanian, a fellow UVA grad and Traba engineer - used the word "excited" twice, which is a light indictment of any adjective's descriptive power but does suggest a specific management style. Shebat comes across, in interviews, as a person who has decided what he thinks and is unlikely to spend the meeting deciding again.

None of this is scandalous. Some of it is the sort of thing that people either strongly agree with or strongly do not. That is probably useful for a founder trying to hire from a self-selecting pool. If you read the 58-hour schedule and think "yes," Traba wants you. If you read it and think "no," Traba does not want to waste your time or its own.

What's Next

Traba's ambition, per Shebat, is roughly Amazon-scale. Whether that happens is a separate question from whether the current product is real, which it appears to be - the company has north of 200 employees, a growing set of enterprise customers in warehousing and distribution, and a Founders Fund seat on the cap table. The market it is chasing - light industrial staffing - is enormous, fragmented, and mostly served by legacy agencies with paper processes.

There is a version of the future in which Traba does what Uber did to livery cars, and the temp agency of 1998 becomes an app of 2028. There is another version in which the legacy agencies get their software act together, or in which the labor market tightens enough that on-demand light industrial supply becomes structurally hard, and Traba stays a good company rather than a defining one.

Shebat's job, then, is the ordinary one: find and vet enough workers to fill enough shifts to keep enough employers so that the flywheel keeps running. He appears to be doing it from an office he does not leave often.