#1037 Mike Shebat On Building The Future Of Work

Mike Shebat is the Co-Founder & CEO of Traba. In this conversation, we discuss Traba's mission to change the future of work, how they connect workers with open shifts, the work ethic of the employees at Traba, and why they are focused on in-office work instead of remote. ======================= BCB Group is the leading payment services partner for the digital assets industry. BCB Group provides payment services in 30+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity, digital asset custody and BLINC, which is BCB’s free, instant settlements network for the BCB client ecosystem. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/Pomp to redeem exclusive Fourth of July savings and start sleeping cool this summer through July 10th. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Mike Shabat is the CEO and co-founder of Trava, the future of work. In this conversation, Mike and I talk about how he and his team have an Olympians work ethic, how they actually run the business on a day-to-day basis, why they work so hard, why they are focused on in-office over remote, and where he sees the impact from taking what appears to be a contrarian view to work in the current age. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mike. I'm a big believer in him and his company, so much so that I even invested. I hope that

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  you enjoy this conversation as well. Before we get into this episode though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by BCB Group. With a dedicated focus on institutional payment services, BCB Group provides business banking, cryptocurrency, and foreign exchange market liquidity for many of the world's largest crypto-engaged financial institutions. BCB business accounts allow businesses to load fiat currency and cryptocurrencies for payments, operations, and trading purposes. BCB's clients can trade FX and cryptocurrencies quickly and at scale with market-leading value. BCB's Blink Network is the European crypto industry's first instance settlements network and one of the first real-time payment networks of its kind to allow free, real-time transactions across fiat and digital currencies. BCB's vision is to empower the global financial revolution

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:55Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:14Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:37Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Mike here with me. I'm very excited about this. I think that you're building an incredible company, but the way you're doing it is super interesting. So explain to everyone what Trava is before we get kind of more into how you actually run the business. You say it's the future of work, right? Which is this big, bold claim. How exactly are you doing it?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're a labor marketplace and we specialize in connecting workers with open shifts at distribution centers and event venues. And these categories specifically, we chose because both of them have variable needs for labor. So I actually used to work in a distribution center. We sold engineering parts. I was part of a management rotation program there. I initially went into finance and then got that job and I just wanted to learn how to manage people.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  And one of our main clients was SpaceX. So if you think about it, SpaceX is like, okay, we're going to build a rocket. We need to buy a bunch of products from this supplier. So then what happens at the supplier is you have your full-time workforce, you have all this new product that you're about to ship. So the warehouse gets crazy busy for about two to three months until the purchase order is over. So what they do is they, and what I did is I would go over to my computer and I would email all these staffing offices. So there's a $520 billion industry called the staffing market. It's 2% of America's workforce and that is like temp labor. But the experience is totally broken. So I would have to wait weeks in advance until people were able to show up. If I were to order, say I'm like, okay, I'm gonna ask for 100 people, less than half would show up and this

• 5:05Speaker 02

  is consistent across the staffing industry. And then once they arrived, I couldn't give any credit like to the good people or like say, oh, I actually don't want to work with this worker again. They didn't really do that well of a job. So there's so much opportunity to revolutionize this through tech and we're leaning into that.

• 5:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about the distribution centers and the event venues, essentially you have a software platform where an individual can go on and say, hey, I want to drive for Uber today. I want to do food delivery or I want to go work with Trava. And you're really competing for kind of this gig worker in the beginning at least. And what they're able to do, from my understanding, is go to either the distribution center or to the event venue. But you all do a lot of work to make sure that it's not just some random person off of the street. It meets some quality bar. It has some skill set in terms of the service you're able to deliver. Talk a little bit about, again, being upfront with the folks who are on the platform and making sure that they meet that quality bar. Like, how do you filter who is good for the platform versus maybe, hey, this person

• 6:03Anthony Pompliano?

  isn't going to actually make us look good to our customers?

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we actually have, we have a very high bar for quality. So just like how Trava hires the top 0.001% of engineers, operators, designers, same with, we want to provide that to our business customers. And there are a lot of workers out there that want to work. They're working hard. We specialize in light industrial. So example shifts are setting up a stage for a large concert. Putting boxes onto trucks, things that anyone can do. They just have to show up on time and have a good work ethic. So because of that, we do hold our quality, like hold the workers to a high standard. There's background checks. We get to know the workers. There's an onboarding process through our app. And then with good behavior, businesses will favor the best workers. And then those workers get first dibs on next shifts, on future shifts.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  And what's interesting is actually it's a lot bigger of a pie than just the gig worker marketplace. So we provide transparency, upfront pricing, like they know exactly how much they're going to get. Our minimum wage on the platform is thirteen dollars an hour, which is well beyond a lot of like most states' minimum wage. And business customers are happy to pay it because of the best workers and being able to get them flexibly.

• 7:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So you started in Miami. You're now starting to go kind of city by city, which for most people, they'd be like, why do you do that? You have a specific experience in your background of having worked at Uber. And kind of seeing how that business went city by city and launched. Talk a little bit about kind of the strategy of starting in one city, really focusing and kind of perfecting the model. And then choosing to go ahead and start scaling it city by city.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so thanks for mentioning that. I joined Uber right when Uber Eats was first launching. Got the opportunity to build out certain operational processes. It was very much hustle at that moment. We were delivering iPads to restaurants. Calling restaurants to tell them that they had an order on their iPad if they weren't getting it.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Setting up their menus on the backend, just very manual stuff. But then with the growth of the business, it unlocked an awesome opportunity for me to essentially get this like entrepreneurship MBA, like global MBA. Where Uber was like, okay, we're going to launch Mexico City. We're going to launch Sao Paulo. We're going to go to South Korea. Like, there's not that many people here, but you've been here, you've been doing it. So you get this awesome opportunity to expand the product. And we have that opportunity now at Trava. So we've built something that the customers love. We're growing extremely fast in Miami. So we're going to be having like a lot of more presence across the country and globally. And anyone that wants to work at Trava can essentially get that opportunity if they join and are in the right place.

• 8:35Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you pick what city to go to next? Is there like a process that you go through that you're like, okay, this is the framework for evaluation?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a couple of things. One, it's interesting because workers that aren't in Miami or aren't in Florida are actually downloading our app, wanting to sign up and work at Trava. So that's one contributor. We're like, okay, wow. And in Texas, we have a lot of workers that are already on the platform. There's not even any shifts yet. And then another is our business customers. So we've actually had most of our, there's a proportion of our business customers in Miami that are like, hey, as soon as you open up in Houston, like, we want to use Trava. Trava's been able to service us really well here. So one is like being polled by our customers, and the other is just broader market. So in terms of the light industrial landscape, it's a $40 billion staffing industry. Florida is a $2 billion industry. Texas is 6.4 billion. So we do want to go after large markets and

• 9:26Speaker 02

  really dominate there.

• 9:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So we talked a little bit about kind of making sure that you have the highest quality users on the platform, which is part of the service that you offer to your customer. You've also mentioned hiring kind of the top 0.001% of various skill sets for the employees of the business. How does running a business with kind of A-plus players differ from maybe running a company that has, you know, A-minus, or B-plus, or even C, you know, grade players? Like, what changes, or how is it different from you as a CEO actually running the business?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's something that you notice when it happens, but like when you're growing and you're like, oh, I just need to hire somebody, you're overlooking at like the opportunity costs there. So if someone is taking responsibility amongst themselves, and if they're an A-plus, top 1%, one of the smartest people, they're just going to be optimizing and innovating in ways that the other person would have not done. So there actually is tangible example of that. So actually, yesterday, we had our all hands, and somebody on my team was presenting this really cool product that they built that essentially slots in workers based on prioritization. So initially, we started that. We only started the company 11 months ago. So we were doing a lot of things that don't scale. We would call our customers. We would like really like manually go into Google Sheets and say,

• 10:41Speaker 02

  okay, these workers should go to these shifts. And he built this entire backend that essentially just automates like requests based on certain behaviors that they've had initially. And if we had just been like- Oh, you know what? We're just gonna have someone that has like call center experience to own this project. We've seen firsthand how that makes a difference. And then secondarily to that, people will pull in their friends. So if you hire A plus players, like Vinod Khosla has said, like, the team you build is the company you build. And I've seen it firsthand. As you get bigger and bigger, as a CEO, you're kind of having to delegate almost like a lot more than being in the trenches, like looking at everything and knowing that an A plus player is thinking through it is really awesome.

• 11:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Will you run the all hands? Like, talk to other founders about like, what do you do at your all hands meetings? That you're like, this is really, really helpful and helps our business move forward.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the, the purpose of an all hands is to make sure that everyone at the company is aligned as to where the ship is heading. So we've been very intentional with our priorities right now, our growth, healthy unit economics and a 10x customer experience. Everyone at the company is, is aligned on those priorities and working towards them. So, so in all hands, what we'll do is initially, when we first started the company, we were all just in a conference room. Every morning we had an all hands and we would just talk about what we're doing. Now it's more intentional. So people will, will write in projects that they're working on, that they think that the rest of the company would benefit from learning about. And then people will upvote different projects that we want to be shared. And then we do look at our KPIs. We're very rigorous at looking at our metrics every week because if you're not paying attention to them, they're just not going to get better.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  So we set very ambitious targets and we just try to keep that momentum and velocity. And nothing's off the table. It's like, we're going to get there and it's going to be, actually, this has happened multiple times where we're like, we need to ship this business product by November 1st. It was last year, we were like, and the engineers were like, oh my gosh, it's like insane timeframe. But then we're like, we can do it. We've let, let's just like, think of ways we can prioritize this and get it right. We hustled and we made it happen. And like, our investors saw it, like, all these little data points convinced our investors that travel, when they say they're going to do something, they're going to win and they're going to do it well.

• 12:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Uh, when you think of these really ambitious goals and you're so obsessive about the metrics themselves, talk me through like, how often do you guys review the metrics? And then how do you communicate those metrics or progress towards these goals with the rest of the team? Is this like a weekly email that goes out? Do you have weekly meetings? What is like the operational kind of tempo around metrics and goals inside the company?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Great question. So Basically, as you scale, every sub-team needs to have metrics like sub-KPIs that lead up to the main KPIs of the company. So we mentioned growth. So gross bookings, like how much revenue is coming into the business is an important metric that we track just as a company. But there's a lot of inputs that go into that. So like, how many new businesses join the platform? How many shifts per business are happening? You can essentially just break it down into a formula that every sub-team can get really focused on. So on the workers, for example, how many perfect shifts? Like, we do track fill rate. So what I mentioned in the staffing industry, they can only fill half of what you ask for, less than half. Trouble fills 100%. So that 100% fill rate is like a 10x customer experience. It's like, oh, my gosh,

• 13:48Speaker 02

  I asked for 15. I actually like over-asked because I was expecting you only deliver 10. Like, now I have 15 people here. So that's kind of what we do. So in the all hands, we go over the overarching KPIs, or we also zoom in on any KPIs that need fixing. And then every sub-team is tracking a KPI so they can really innovate and just be like, look, as long as my number's moving up, like, I can use my imagination on this.

• 14:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You talked about in the beginning of the business, you guys were all in the same conference room. You also are somewhat unique in that there's no remote work. There's no, hey, maybe you want to go take the afternoon off and go hang out by the pool or anything like that. It's in-person, in an office, for a very long period of time, every single day. Why do you emphasize so much the in-person versus remote work?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we hire for people that we really believe that they're going to be on the New York Stock Exchange, like ringing the bell with us. Everyone that joins now, we have a growth mindset, which is one of our values. Everyone that joins now has the opportunity to grow into a leadership, like a very high-up leadership position at the company. If someone is doing well at their job, no one's ever going to say, you know what? You can't take that on. There's many examples of a lot of startups that have done this, and then they become... Like, there's this woman at Uber named Austin, Austin Guyet. She joined as an intern, and then she led the autonomous vehicle project, and she was at the New York Stock Exchange, like ringing the bell. There's lots of examples of people that join early, are with the team, in-person, get to know the culture of the company. Company. So with that growth mindset, one thing I wanted to mention is there's like this

• 15:19Speaker 02

  component to having a company that's a little bit more than just a transactional, I'm doing my project. It's like this camaraderie and like really stark belief in the mission of the company in like the trajectory of the company. And you really only get that in person and remote companies know this, which is why they do off sites. Like if they really believed that you could build an awesome company with a lot of loyalty, a lot of the employees really understanding each other and liking each other, they would not do off sites if they if they knew that could be all done on a remote. And then the second is communication. So like, you're really slowing down your company. If you're like, okay, let's hop on this zoom call. And then you're like, okay, 30 minutes is the zoom call. So here we are talking at Trava, we're all sitting next to each other. So I'm the CEO, I sit next to, I have the CTO, there's all the engineers, all

• 16:04Speaker 02

  the operators, everyone's in the same room. So they'll just kind of pick up just by osmosis, what's going on, which actually allows them to innovate better. Because maybe it wouldn't have been worth either of our time to hop on a 30 minute zoom meeting. But when I get back from an investor meeting, I'm like, guys, this is what I learned. This is how it went. This is how we're thinking about things. What do you guys think? And all these conversations just happen sporadically. So I feel like, or I've seen with my own eyes, just like the intangibles of working together in person. It's just been really good.

• 16:31Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned growth mindset. What are the other values that you guys really kind of instill as, hey, this is what we stand for?

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the first is dream big. It goes back to what I mentioned about being intentional. We don't shy away from saying that, look, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do it right. We're gonna aim to be a trillion dollar business. Like, our investors, they only invest in the best companies in the world. They've seen with their own eyes, the the facts of what we what we've been able to deliver. They see the market size. So if we're work, so dream big is the first trillion dollar business, not off the table. And then Olympians work ethic. It takes some hustle to do that. Growth mindset. So I've never been a CEO of a 22 person company. It's growing and growing. So I need to have a growth mindset to be reflective of, how can I get better? I want everyone on the team to also feel that way, because their career is also going to skyrocket.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  And then the last one is customer obsession. So we're building for a customer that has been overlooked. A lot of people in Silicon Valley. Having met the working class of our country. So these people get up early, they get on the bus, they go to the warehouse, they work their butts off all day, they actually ask us to do a second job, like they're hustlers, so we're hustling for them, we're really obsessed about making their lives better.

• 17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about the investors that you work with on a day-to-day basis. You've got some of the best investors in the world that have invested in the business. And you said previously to me that like, it's kind of like getting this entrepreneurship MBA, because you're getting to learn directly from them. What is that experience like?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been an absolute, like, it's just been an amazing experience. So our investors are a founder's fund, Keith Raboy, who's here with us in Miami. He throws workout classes for the team, he introduced us to Brian Chesky. Brian Chesky was like, look, like this guy is really the best in the world. Because at that time, I was about to raise our Series A, and like, he gave really good advice. So like, just, he's always checking in, he's coming by the office, like, asking people what they're working on, giving people his opinion. The other investor is Catherine Boyle, who invested from General Catalyst, she's now at Andreessen Horowitz, she's also here in Miami. So being in person has also, us being one of the few tech companies that are fully in person, all in Miami, has really opened up a lot more access than if we were remote,

• 18:36Speaker 02

  or if we were just in San Francisco, where we're a dime a dozen, it's just been like a really cool game changer.

• 18:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and when you think about, you know, these investors, how much of it is in a conversation like, hey, let me tell you exactly what I think you should do, and it's prescriptive, versus it's, let me introduce you to four or five people who have been in the same situation, and go learn almost through osmosis, or learn from kind of the history of what they've gone through? Like, how do you interact with them in terms of actually getting advice? And then which do you find more valuable?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  We actually get both. So for the second point, one thing we're trying to tackle right now is, how do we really build our business out of the marketplace with extreme scale? Because now that we've actually got quite a variety of customers, we're trying to build out like a more of a sales team. So if you're an A-plus salesperson, definitely apply to travel, there's lots of opportunity to get in early. But Keith was like, look, I'm gonna introduce you to one of the first people at Fair, first people at DoorDash. And I got to learn as, okay, DoorDash, just like travel. And just like Uber Eats, like you were early at the early days, you were calling in to restaurants, trying to make things hack things together. And then they also were like, okay, how do we change this from founder led sales to now more of a structured sales, sales process? So he will like,

• 19:49Speaker 02

  our investors will connect us to other people, but then they're also very much in the trenches with us. And then it's just more conversational. So if it's something that's just like, hey, I just want to get your thoughts on this. This is how we're thinking about it. We've got, we've gotten a lot of great advice.

• 20:02Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that you mentioned is Keith throws workout parties. I've seen the team multiple times. You guys go to Barry's and have this kind of fitness culture. Where does that come from? Is that something that just is you and you're interested in fitness and the rest of the team kind of jumps in as well? Or is there something intentional there from a company building standpoint?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  It's actually interesting. It wasn't actually that intentional. It was more of I, but I did think it, I do think it comes from the Olympians work ethic. So a lot of athletes, they have to put in the work, like the results speak for themselves. They know that practice makes perfect. So us being intentional about that value just brought a lot of athletes. We have some like Duke tennis, tennis players on the team. We've gotten an NFL player that wanted to, to work at Trava. He actually went to UVA with me. And then Keith is very interested in since Keith is very much involved in our process and our, our company, he'll, he'll throw Barry's classes and we'll just all work out together. And then secondarily to that, we're all trying to have a healthy mind, healthy body, like it all kind of compounds. We're not sitting there like hunched over at

• 21:01Speaker 02

  our desks, just working on things and not like thinking, being intentional about it's the long term. So we have like protein at the office. We, we buy like breakfast, lunch and dinner for everybody. They can put in their orders. We have this catering company that does it is actually like, if you like working in person and you want to be kind of like that entrepreneurship MBA situation where you're working with these people that have literally been early at some of the best companies in the world and build really cool stuff, like we're the company to do it at.

• 21:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You mentioned the meals. This is more like meal plans. This is not like like, hey, randomly, let's order from McDonald's. Talk a little bit about what the meal situation is.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  So that also came organic. So we initially We worked out of the founders fund office initially, which was really cool. Like right when you started the company, uh, it was last summer. So everyone had already been vaccinated. Everyone was starting to work in person. You're like, you know what? And founders fund was look, we have this office in Brickell. We have space if you guys want to start working in the office with us. So immediately unlocked, we got like an office manager snacks and like initially they were paying for DoorDash every day. So we were like, okay, this is great. Then we moved to our own office. We, we started with DoorDash, but by that point, most people at the company would, would just to walk you through like, kind of like how it works is like, people will show up to work, we'll grind together around 6pm. Like of course people are like starting to like, okay, like I'm going to go hit the gym.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  So actually almost everyone at the company, and if people rather do yoga or like some people go take a nap because people live close to the office. They go do their own thing for like an hour and a half, hour or so, then get back to work. And then they were just like refreshed and ready to grind again. So that's actually like started to become a thing. So when we were thinking about meal plans or how we were going to do our meals, people were starting to be like, oh, like to be honest, like I get kind of groggy when I have like these arerepos like every single day and like all these, like all this DoorDash stuff. So we were like, let's look into catered fit. So we actually use this one meal plan service called catered fit. People can say, okay, I'm paleo, I'm vegan, I'm keto. And it's really cool. They just like designing meal plan. We have these refrigerators in the office and it's, and they deliver the food every morning. So it's, it's really cool.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  So if you're trying to optimize for like being on the top, top of your game for health and uh, like learning, it's, it's an awesome place.

• 23:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk to me about, um, you have this very specific culture and uh, you're looking for A plus players that want to work hard, uh, go after a large problem. And if you are successful, it will be this massive opportunity. Obviously the people who are early to it will financially benefit, but also you'll have this, you know, amazing impact for millions and millions of people on the United States and globally. Uh, what are some of the mistakes you've made from like a hiring standpoint? And what are some of the lessons that you've learned as you've gotten this like entrepreneurship MBA where you're like, man, I wish that I knew that in the beginning, but you know, better to learn now than when we're a thousand employees or 5,000 employees.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So actually it, we did initially hire for the role like that is currently there. So we You're like, okay, we need to build relationships with workers. Let's just hire anyone that can like build that relationship. It just didn't work out because what you need to do is hire for six months, a year out. So you hire top caliber people. Initially, they may end up doing the small stuff like the hustle and that's actually going to make them better at their jobs when we scale and they understand like, oh, I did that myself. So even at Uber Eats, like I myself like loaded a ton of iPads in my car and was driving around hot Texas, like talking to restaurant owners. But what that did is it gave me insights for when we were building a restaurant onboarding process at scale. I was like, oh, actually this is like

• 24:29Speaker 02

  the nuances of how it works. So that's, that's one lesson we did learn about, about that. And then the second is like being extremely upfront about what it takes and it's, it's fine if it's not for you. So like a lot of companies, they'll like try to wine and dine candidates, kind of mislead them into thinking that like working is going to be a certain way. But then when someone joins, they're like, wait a minute, like this is not what I expected. And that never works out. You just want to be like, look, we, the company is operating this way. Eventually at scale, we'll have such a mo, we'll be such a big business that we'll probably have a little bit more work-life balance. But if you want to join a series A or seed company and you actually want that company to be successful and win, like there's just going to be a lot going on in your profession that maybe you're going to have to make some sacrifices in your personal life.

• 25:15Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the culture that you all have cultivated, when you have A plus players, I always equate no bullshit with A plus players, right? They're here to do the job. There's not, I joke with friends, like, there's not a lot of chit chat. It's just like, hey, we're here to work. And obviously if everyone has that same mindset because of the filtering that goes on before they're actually coming to the company, they feel like I am surrounded by great people. And it's very similar to like, maybe like the Navy SEALs or some of these high-performance teams, you know, that aren't in business, where people almost feel like imposter syndrome to a degree because like, I can't believe I get to work with these people every day and I have to bring 100% of my best effort or I will be exposed that I'm not as good as everybody else.

• 25:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And so naturally that also leads to honesty. So the no bullshit, no chit chat, but it also leads to this like honesty. Component where feedback, nobody takes it personally or is a much less personal kind of offense taken when somebody says, hey, you're not doing what we need you to do, step it up. And so what do you see there in terms of like the conversations that employees have with each other and kind of the culture that naturally comes from being able to be honest with each other because the mission is so important?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's a really good point. I actually, it does actually have to be everybody being bought in on this. So even like trying to get feedback, like when you're growing so fast and you want to throw things out and just be like, okay, let's try this, the company is bound to make some mistakes. I mean, it's never like a straight path to the top. You're always going to hit roadblocks. So actually, thinking about your job that way is something that is important. So actually Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber or the founder of Uber, he said something that resonated with with me, which is he was like, I'm kind of like a math professor. Math professors would not be happy if there weren't any problems. Like I'm going to go through my day and solve problems. So because like inherently startups are hard work, we're upfront that it's hard

• 27:07Speaker 02

  work. People can make mistakes and that's fine. As long as we retroactively look at, okay, what did we learn as a company? Let's not make that mistake again. Don't take things personal. And since everyone is trying to get better, like it's just better. And it all comes into like the growth mindset.

• 27:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's been the biggest surprise to you in the year or so that you've been running the business? Obviously, it's had, you know, meteoric growth. You're surrounded by some of the best investors in the world. It's obviously a huge problem. What's been the surprises?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  The biggest surprise is actually when we started the company, the great resignation was happening. There was a huge, like we, everyone was returning from the pandemic. Everyone said, oh, workers don't want to work. No one can hire. So we actually thought that we would have a huge, like a very big problem on the supply of workers on the platform and the demand would come easy. But what actually happened is workers and the data point to that is there was 75% more job openings in warehousing than before the pandemic, because everyone started shopping online. Distribution centers were closer where people lived. So and there was just all this pent up demand. So we were like, wow, the market is exploding. We're going to have a hard time finding workers. But what we found is now we actually have so many workers. On our platform were like, we got to get them more shifts because workers, they want to work.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  They want to return, just like how a lot of people who worked in tech are like, ah, I got a flavor of remote. I might want remote. People that work in hourly labor, like they have essentially been handed schedules. They're like, hey, you have to work these schedules. You have to cover for this person. So if you have childcare or anything else you're doing, then this is your, this is what you got to do. You got to get paid. Also, like you usually start with like a certain shift and you have to earn your way over a decade to get like a shift that you want. But then workers during the pandemic also got that flavor. They're like, wait a minute, like I am able to have more flexible work. So they're actually returning to the workforce in droves, wanting more transparency, like no one knows what's happening in a warehouse or what the conditions of an event are going to be before you join. Whereas if you start to like add a tech layer to it,

• 29:01Speaker 02

  it actually unlocks a lot for them. Like for example, and we're, we're always thinking about innovative ways to help them. So they're living paycheck to pay, a lot, a lot of them are living paycheck to paycheck. They get paid every two weeks. Someone might be like, wait, that's so like, why would, why does, why do businesses have to pay every two weeks? Well, we learned that there's a certain, there's a certain penalty to businesses if they're W two workers that the business has to pay for every single paycheck if there's, if there's anything that went wrong. So since we have our legal structure in a certain way, we do instant pay. So as a worker is walking out to the bus stop, they get the money in their bank, they're good to go, they can take the bus home. So like, we're always thinking about unlocks, but the biggest surprise was the fact that workers want to work. They want to be upskilled or working on like completely revolutionizing like the way that people work in this, in this industry.

• 29:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I think a lot about this like pendulum swing that's happening. It's the last thing I want to spend some time talking about. So during good times, uh, uh, there's the meme or, or kind of saying of like, you know, good times create weak men. Weak men create the bad times and you kind of have this like cycle that plays over and over and over again. But what I do think that we saw over the last couple of years during the good times was much more receptivity across America really to socialist type ideas. Or this ability of like, you know, maybe the government will actually pay me through UBI or the popular, popularization of, oh, wait a minute, the pandemic is happening. Like, let's all turn to the government and they'll send the stimulus checks, they'll bail out. Certain industries, all this stuff. Now that we're heading more towards tougher economic times and nobody knows how bad it'll be

• 30:30Anthony Pompliano?

  or how long it'll last. It does feel like the pendulum swings back to hard work. No one's coming to save you. Like these ideals that feel like it's what America was built on. Talk a little bit about how you think about operating when you start the business in frankly, good times and now maybe not going towards such great times. Like what changes there or what do you see in the mindset difference between the workers that you guys started working with and maybe the workers today?

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So I'll talk about the customer first and then I'll talk about us as a business. So the workers, they essentially, workers actually do want to achieve the American dream. They want to work hard. They want to move up in their career. I think a lot of the resentment or like these socialist like attitudes kind of sprung up from the fact that a lot of, a lot of industry has not really like unlocked that to some hourly laborers. So if you're working in a warehouse, you really can't become the supervisor unless the supervisor leaves. There's not a lot of measurement of like how productive you are, whereas our tech, like we're thinking big. We're going to be building all sorts of productivity tools, like reaching the, our mission is to unlock the potential and productivity of workers and businesses.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  So workers on our platform, they actually, it is a meritocracy. They get more opportunity for hard work. So we start them out, the conditions are great, they, they work at a company, they work hard and then with hard work, they get more, they get more opportunities. So we do upskilling, we are, we're paying for them to get their forklift license. If someone's, we've had people at event venues that become supervisors on the platform to help other, to monitor other workers and essentially make sure that everyone understands how to use the technology. So I think that this socialist mentality also comes from people in the big cities that are projecting onto the working class, saying like, this is what the working class wants. But the working class, like the working men and women of this country work extremely

• 32:19Speaker 02

  hard, they have discipline, they wake up early, they, they're really pushing. And then, and then the second for us of how we've, we've structured the business. So like fortunately for us, and one of the reasons why we were able to raise such a great round, even in this economic climate and why we're leaning into growth. We're hiring aggressively. We're almost going to be tripling our team over the next 12 months. Is because when we started the company, we were very intentional about we are building something that businesses and work that really benefits businesses and workers. So our unit economics are very healthy. Like, we weren't growing at all costs, throwing money, like pretending that our product was good. Like, we were very intentional about making sure that we were charging a healthy markup rate to the business.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Workers work for free on our platform, but we were making sure that we had like a healthy pay rate for the workers that they were happy with. So so being intentional about that actually sets us up for a lot of success going into a possible recession. Because what happens on the business side is when times are good, you're like, okay, I know exactly what's going to happen. SpaceX is going to put in this order. Like, this company, like Paramount Pictures, is going to buy a bunch of stuff. They do it every year. So I'm going to have 80% full-time staff, 20% part-time, like temp labor. Now that no one really knows what the economic climate is going to be, is there's going to be cost-cutting measures at businesses. So cut the the full-time workforce. And then as they get that, oh, my gosh, I got a, I got an order in, I got to staff up.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Like, they're going to leverage the staffing industry even more. So like, we've actually seen that in customer behavior, where our type of business actually thrives in economic downturns, and we've really seen that in what's happening.

• 33:52Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think out 10, 20 years, and somebody comes back and listens to this, what do you hope to have achieved in that 10 to 20-year period?

• 34:03Speaker 02

  I hope that we have made a significant amount of impact to the way that people work around the world. We we plan on being a global company. We, there's two different verticals of how we essentially become like the AWS for labor. On the worker side, like, we are paying, we like, the money comes from the business to us, we pay the worker. There is so much opportunity for financial upside and like essentially being able to help them financially that we're already looking into. We did the instant pay. We're looking into building a providing a travel debit card. We can really uplift the workers in a lot of different ways there. And then on the business side, we're leaning into automation as well. So like, we are our.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Mission to increase the productivity and potential of workers and businesses unlocks. Like if you go into a warehouse today, people are still using walkie talkies. They have these big scanning guns that are like slapping amongst their leg. It's huge. It was developed like decades ago. There's so many cool innovations that we can build that really unlock like America's workforce and the world's workforce that just don't exist today. No one's really working on them right now.

• 35:10Anthony Pompliano?

  To close up, what's your pitch to people who are listening to this like, man, that sounds like an awesome company. I wonder if they have any open roles or I wonder whether it's a job that I could go and work and enjoy. What's your pitch to potential candidates as to why they should come work at Trava?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  I would say if you're at the point of your life where you want to lean into professional growth and trying to be the best that you can be, this is the place for you. We have like an immense amount of mentorship from some of the best investors in the world. We are growing significantly fast, which just unlocks a lot of opportunity to work on really cool innovative projects. We're working on dynamic pricing, marketplace tools, all this like really cool stuff. We're expanding globally, so there's going to be opportunities to really be your own entrepreneur in a different market and grow that out. The world is your oyster. If you want to work hard and you want to be like, look, just like going to law school, like anyone that wants to go to law school, they're like, okay, I know it's going to be hard,

• 36:06Speaker 02

  but I'm going to leave having learned a lot and meeting the friends of my lifetime. And that's what we're doing here. Like we're in the trenches, we're building together. So you're going to have relationships that last forever, kind of like the Trava mafia, kind of like the PayPal mafia. That's the goal. And then while doing that, you're going to have a very positive impact that you can see in our customers' eyes while you do it.

• 36:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can people come find you on the internet or find out more about Trava?

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, they can just go to www.trava-work, like W O R K. And we have a careers page there and you can just apply there and mention you listen to the Palm Podcast and I'll keep an eye out for you.

• 36:41Anthony Pompliano?

  If somebody gets a job, because they mentioned that, you'll have to let me know. Mike, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I'm obviously a huge fan of what you guys are doing. And it's a huge, huge, huge problem. And I just like the approach of, hey, we're gonna find the best people in the world, we're gonna work our asses off. And if everything goes right, we can build, you know, a trillion plus dollar company and actually have a positive impact on these businesses and workers. And I think it's a mission worth going after. So, anyone who hasn't yet taken a look, go to travel dot work and we'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Cool. Thank you.

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.