Software at Scale - Software at Scale 50 - Redefining Labor with Akshay Buddiga

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Akshay Buddiga is the co-founder and CTO of Traba, a labor management platform.Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsSorry for the long hiatus in episodes! Today’s episode covers a myriad of interesting topics - from being the star of one of the internet’s first viral videos, to experiencing the hyper-growth at the somewhat controversial Zenefits, scaling out the technology platform at Fanatics, starting a company, picking an accelerator, only permitting in-person work, facilitating career growth of gig workers, and more!Highlights[0:00] - The infamous Spelling Bee incident.[06:30] - Why pivot to Computer Science after an undergraduate focus in biomedical engineering?[09:30] - Going to Stanford for Management Science and getting an education in Computer Science.[13:00] - Zenefits during hyper-growth. Learning from Parker Conrad.[18:30] - Building an e-commerce platform with reasonably high scale (powering all NFL gear) as a first software engineering gig. Dealing with lots of constraints from the beginning - like multi-currency support - and delivering a complete solution over several years.The interesting seasonality - like Game 7 of the NBA finals - and the implications on the software engineers maintaining e-commerce systems. Watching all the super-bowls with coworkers.[26:00] - A large outage, obviously due to DNS routing.[31:00] - Why start a company?[37:30] - Why join OnDeck?[41:00] - Contrary to the current trend, Traba only allows in-person work. Why is that?We go on to talk about the implications of remote work and other decisions in an early startup’s product velocity.[57:00] - On being competitive.[58:30] - Velocity is really about not working on the incorrect stuff.[68:00] - What’s next for Traba? What’s the vision?[72:30] - Building two-sided marketplaces, and the career path for gig workers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.softwareatscale.dev

Welcome to Software at Scale, a podcast where we discuss the technical stories behind large software applications. I'm your host, Utsav Shah, and thank you for listening. Hey, welcome to another episode of the Software at Scale podcast. Joining me here today is Akshay Budhiga, the co-founder and CTO of Traba, a labor marketplace platform. Welcome. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So to start with, I have to ask the question that's been on my mind probably for the last week or so about the spelling bee. Could you give us a brief introduction of why the spelling bee story is famous and like just how all of that got started yeah yeah for sure so um yeah so this is my i guess early claim to fame

um when i was a kid so um just for for background i was in the national spelling Bee back in 2004 when I was in middle school. And it's now a pretty, I guess, semi-famous popular meme on YouTube video. Because what happened at the time was I basically was in the National Spelling Bee. I got to the sixth round. It was on ESPN. And I got a word that I wasn't quite sure how to spell. A lot of people might have seen the video now at this point on YouTube, but I got a word I wasn't sure how to spell, and I was kind of going back and forth between the two ideas I had for it. And I ended up locking my knees and fainting. And so if you look up like spelling be faint on YouTube, you'll see it.

But I was able to recover pretty quickly. I just locked my knees. And so I didn't really pass out completely. I got back up and I picked one of the two that I was going with and felt a little bit stronger about and spelled it and ended up getting it right. And so got it right, moved on in the competition, ended up getting second place at the end of it. But it became like a pretty popular video um during that time just because it's obviously kind of kind of funny and kind of crazy uh how it happened but that was like my early claim to fame and it's kind of funny that now

it's still something that obviously comes up uh i've been like approached randomly and oh you know i'd like a chipotle and random stuff like that can happen but uh but it's still just kind of funny little part of my past but uh but yeah and and your brother also did pretty well in like spelling bee so like i guess the one question that's always been on my mind i've never had the opportunity to ask anyone before this is like what is the environment that makes like a champion family of like spelling bee speller kids right like um is it that you decide someday or your parents decide that this is something you're going to do yeah whatever you want to talk about about that would be interesting yeah yeah definitely so um yeah so my brother was also um in the spelling bee he won the national spelling bee in 2002 so two years before

i competed in the nationals and so we were definitely like very much a spelling bee family i remember this is probably when i was in i think fourth or yeah fourth or fifth grade um we were watching on espn the the spelling bee and geography bee, which they usually broadcast at that time. And I remember my brother and I both watching that and saying like, hey, why not us? That could definitely be us. And my mom was our coach. And so she was obviously like, yeah, if you guys want to do this, let's do it. And so we just started, we basically set a goal for ourselves that we wanted to compete and go to the nationals. And so we started, we started working on it and we started studying, you know, word lists, etymologies, and basically spent a good portion of our time outside of school

for the next several years focused on this dream. And so in terms of like what it what it takes to do it, like it's, it's, it's nothing too crazy, it's going to be a lot of hard work, a lot of studying, you know, working on understanding the wordless etymologies, you know, word origins, making those connections, studying the vocabulary as well. And so we were both super competitive, we were very competitive with each other as well. This went beyond like spelling and geography and like school, basketball, everything else. Like we were very competitive. And so we pushed each other to get better.

And, you know, that I think it really fueled the success we would later see. That's fascinating, right? The first thing you imagine when you see all of those like olympian videos is like you know really pushy parents and stuff but it doesn't sound like it was that at all it was just like a pushy brother you're both super competitive as you mentioned it's like i'm gonna do this it's pretty cool yeah yeah yeah my parents were our parents were very supportive um and uh even even at the points where it was like extremely stressful or like we weren't sure you know if we wanted to continue doing it or anything like that

our parents were always like hey if this is something you want to do then that's great if you want to do something else that's fine too um and it but it was a goal that we'd set for ourselves and we wanted to to see it through and i think you you basically achieved the goal like coming first coming second like that's all kind of the same it's just amazing right so and then i'm guessing at some point like after um high school or whatever you got over it and you're like i'm just gonna do something else yeah yeah i mean we were still super competitive we both did um there was another competition that we both uh uh did in in uh geography geography in in high school that was not the geography it was a it was called the

triple a travel challenge um obviously competitive on everything in school like we were both in the knowledgeable and match with uh uh state championship i won that my senior year of high school so it was something that obviously like continued we were just always super competitive in those in those things but uh but yeah it was a lot of fun as as an only child i cannot relate at all but i'm like this is pretty this is pretty interesting so somehow you you figured yourself from that into like tech right and you're like cto of a company now but you did a bunch of stuff in the middle uh what did you do just for your undergrad yeah so i went to duke university for college and i studied biomedical engineering so i was always interested in in science and uh did some part-time work at a genetics lab in in high school and was always very much interested in in that side of things in genetics biomedical engineering medicine and so i followed that passion into college um and it's still

something that i actually like very interested in and then passionate about like i keep up on it like outside of work but what i realized during the course of my studies in university was that this was something that I liked a lot, but it wasn't something that I felt like was aligned with the pace that I like to work at. So normally in biomedical research, it usually takes, it can take 8, 10, 12, 15 years to get something from early stages to actually get to market, go through all the approvals and regulation that you need to. And it obviously makes sense. You're going to be doing something with the human body and so you need to be very certain that what you're doing is going to work and going to be

effective and not cause any harm. And so that all made sense. But for me, for the pace that I like to work at, I like having that fast iteration loop. And so that's basically what ended up drawing me towards the technology industry. It's something that you can move very quickly at. You can make a lot of progress in a very short amount of time. And so that's how I kind of ended up switching my focus there. Okay. And do you feel like that is definitely held true like i think you can tell that there are

like technology companies that are not even 10 years old and worth billions of dollars so it seems like it's true do you think the pace of iteration and stuff is still quick do you think it's slowing down there's like more regulation and stuff over time or it's that that promise is held through held true i think it's generally held. I think there's still a ton that you can get done in a very short amount of time in tech. And I think software enables you to scale at a pace that is unmatched. So the scale you can achieve with software and the internet, you can go from just having an idea to having a globally used service in a year or two years. And so that is something that I think is the promise of the

internet and the promise of software is really borne that out. I think there's obviously, depending on what area you're in or how much your products are touching the real world, there's going to be challenges that you'll have to overcome. But I think the software and the internet has really helped you achieve a level of skill that previously wasn't really possible. And you didn't study computer science in your master's, but you did management science, but you took all the CS electives.

Yeah, I guess. So you didn't really go in thinking about the master's in computer science or anything, but it just ended up working out that way. Yeah. So what I did at the end of college, I was basically thinking, okay, well, I'm not going to go into biomedical engineering as a profession. Like, what do I want to do? I want to get into tech. figured the best place to be was going to be silicon valley and it's going to be um you know going to an environment at stanford uh for my master's program would be amazing and so i applied for the management science and engineering program um which is a pretty broad program that covers different topic areas and i was really focused on the one vertical of

organizations technology and entrepreneurship and so what i figured was like this was a good path to get into the tech space and while i was at Stanford, I could also take a bunch of computer science classes and understand the tech and programming side of things, while also immersing myself in the tech community that was there. And so I came to Stanford, I started doing electives outside of my program in in CS, and immediately was like, this is this is it. This is awesome. I definitely want to build, you know, technology products. And so ended up taking all my electives pretty much at Stanford or in computer science, I actually talked to the department there about if I could get a minor in CS while I was there

getting my master's in MS&E. And they said I couldn't, but I just did the classes anyways. But that was like really just an amazing experience. And the type of people you meet, obviously, in the program are top notch and stellar talent. So that was really awesome and really built my belief in that this was the right path for myself. And working in the technology this was the right path for myself and and working in the technology industry was the right path and would you say you're still in touch with like some of the people you met then have you recruited any to your company now so yeah i'm in touch with um some

of the folks from for my program i've reached out to some of them to to join um but i haven't uh had success yet though so that's So that's still a TBD, but I've also recruited some folks that were part of the alumni network from Duke at my university level. And so that's been awesome. We actually have a really awesome team of Duke folks at Trava.

And so that's been great. Yeah, I feel like most of my management chain for most of my career, it seems like, has been Stanford somewhere or the other. I work for Vantav, who's like Christina's the CEO, Stanford, head of engineering, Stanford,

manager I work most closely with, even though I don't report to him, Stanford. So I feel like there's this Stanford cloud everywhere. But but yeah it's always it's always super smart people yeah i have to say um and and right after that you did zenefits right zenefits is like a now slightly more infamous company with the whole parker conrad stuff but um i mean i can imagine like i i like vanda does some some work with Rippling and I've read the news,

I've seen like the funding stuff and they're doing like amazing stuff. They've taken like a completely different approach where like, oh, they're building every product that a company needs from like an HR space, whatever, like MDMs, all of that, like in parallel and most startup advisors like focus on one thing right so i feel

like i can imagine the pace at which parker condor would run his companies like and you mentioned something about zenefits being like super fast paced uh what was your experience like over there yeah yeah so i joined zenefits in 2014 um and this was, at the time, it was, I think it was pretty much the fastest growing startup in Silicon Valley. And so I joined, I think I was employed like 225. And when I left, which was about a year and a half later, it scaled to something like 1600 people. And so it was just an absolutely insane growth rate. We were adding so many people every single week. And the pace of the work was extremely fast. We were looking to deliver on

things like pretty much everything we're trying to do is we're trying to deliver yesterday. There was so many different products that we were working on as a larger organization. The sales team was really looking to expand as quickly as possible. I remember the goal at the time when going into 2015 was scaling up to $100 billion run rate revenue by the end of the year. And so the targets were extremely high and ambitious, and the team was really... I think we hired some really amazing talent even now i would say like looking back the ex-xenefits mafia is actually has gone on to do really amazing things and so um looking back it's just like an amazing group of people all together

working towards this uh this objective um and so like i learned a lot about you know working and scaling at a high growth startup but also learned some of the things that can go wrong um if you don't set up the right processes you don't um have the right uh the right the right targets being being set at the top and and the right focus in terms of the product and engineering roadmap i think a lot of the things that i think we at zenefits we probably spread to try and do too many things too early. There's a lot of tech debt that ended up building up and then slowing us down later. Corners were being cut on the sales side, which is what I think everyone has mostly read about or heard about. And so those are some of the like lessons learned there on how to the ways to scale and the ways that don't scale so well. And so definitely learned a lot from from working there.

And I think like, obviously, Parker is and I think Parker is amazing leader. He, he can obviously tell by like, how he builds companies. And I think he took a lot of those lessons that, you know, things that worked and the things that didn't work um at zeta fits and then really applied them at rippling and they've been obviously growing very quickly yeah is there is there anything uh is there like a particular example of something that you think went well um maybe just from like the technology perspective yeah yeah so i mean i think i think the pace that our team worked at was, that was something that was like eye opening to me at the time, like there was just obviously we're doing trying to do so many different things, different product lines, there was tech debt. But the pace of delivery, so worked with some incredibly talented engineers on the team there, as I was working on the 401k product, and, you know, setting those timelines and understanding when we're going to launch improvements to the product, launch new features for the 401k integrations. That was something where I realized, like, we can really push it to the limit and like

bring these timelines in and compress as much as possible to keep our, you know, pace of delivery up. And so that was something that i saw like you know there's not really like a limit the limit is like what you said for yourself and so uh working with those that group of people really uh kind of set set the bar in my mind on on what that pace could look like yeah and trying to ship software quickly is it's, but like a lot of it, like if you set up a really long timeline, the work expands to meet that timeline. Yeah, I've certainly seen that as well. Okay. And then you transitioned to like a full-time like software engineer job right after that, right?

So what made you switch? Was it just like, oh, the standard two years in a Silicon Valley company, it's time to move. Something interesting came up. Yeah. the standard two years in a silicon valley company time to move something interesting came up yeah so so i was looking to i was working on the 401k product and was looking to get closer to the product side of things um i did a project with the uh engineering team at zenefits um just a short like one to two month project um to kind of get a taste of what it was like. I'd obviously taken all the CS classes at Stanford, but I was like, okay, what does it look like to work in a professional context? And so I did that as kind of like a side, you know, night on the nights and weekends type of project in addition to my normal work and really loved it. It was something that I was looking

forward to doing more so than like the normal stuff in my job and so i realized like this was probably the path is to get even closer to actually building and so that was something that i've noticed is like whenever i was doing these specs and requirements and working with engineers i wanted to actually jump in and work with them and start building and so that was something that uh that really drove me and so from there that's kind of what led me to the next chapter of actually going into engineering uh full-time and you went from being a software engineer probably like this is your first software engineering job all the way to like your staff engineer and like becoming a manager so you had like a pretty quick career progression at fanatics right so like what does fanatics do

yeah yeah so fanatics is uh an e-commerce platform for all the major sports leagues they're actually expanding outside of sports now um but they basically handle all the online stores for the nba the nfl uh mlb tons of soccer clubs um you know mls uh basically tons of. So I think overall fanatics runs probably over three or 400 different global e commerce sites. And they also handle some of the branding and manufacturing as well. So they have exclusive deals with with Nike to do the fan apparel for for I believe the NFL and the NHL. And so they've been expanding significantly. The technology side is a large part of it, but they also have the full apparel manufacturing and branding and design part of it

as well. And so I joined there in 2016. And what really drew me to that opportunity was the ability to come in and build a platform from the ground up. And so Fanatics is actually a pretty older company, but they actually revamped quite a bit in 2015. They brought in an entirely new management team and kind of re-centered around making technology the primary driver of their strategy. And so they hired out a really top-notch team in the Bay Area. They hired a lot of folks who were ex-Ebay, ex-Google

to come in and lead the Bay Area. They hired a lot of folks who are ex eBay, ex Google to come in and lead the management team. And so what really drew me to the opportunity was the ability to come in and be part of this new build out of the new tech platform. So it needed to be, it was already, the company as a whole was already operating globally, was close to a billion dollars in annual revenue. And so it wasn't the case of like, this needs to be startup scale and then figure out how to scale it later. It was very much like we need to build this platform from the ground up to be able to handle massive scale, be able to be multi-language and work across the globe.

And so that was really an attractive opportunity for me to come in and learn from the beginning on how to build like a global scale platform and all the right, you know, the right ways of architecting that. And so I joined in summer 2016. And I stayed there until I left to start Trava last year. And, you know, when, when I was, when I joined, I was sold opportunity as like, Hey, come in here, learn all this, uh,

learn all this stuff about building a global scale platform, learn how to, to do multi-language, multi-currency support, um, how to, you know, have hundreds of different websites operating on the same technology platform.

And I, when I looking back, like when I ended up leaving, I was like i came here and did all the things that we were planning to do like we actually did all the things and and it was uh it was an awesome awesome experience our team grew significantly and took on more and more ownership and responsibility was able to actually uh take on a management role and hire out a team um and and learn a ton during that time as well. So it was really an awesome experience.

I think the difference is like, this is like an established company, right? So what was the product velocity like over there? Was it similar? Was it like, it doesn't sound like it was slower because you'd got a lot of stuff done. Yeah, so I would say it wasn't quite the same like startup pace.

I think Fanatics was probably at like a series D or yeah, series D or so, I think when I joined. Um, and so it was definitely a little bit slower at the pace than, than Zenefits. Um, but I think my team was, uh, a very high velocity team. Like we deliver very quickly. Um, my manager was, uh, was awesome. And I think one of the, uh the best leaders of the company and he's also risen up through the ranks in the last several years as well. So I think the team and

I think a lot of times when you think about going to a bigger company like the team you're on matters a lot and so I think our team was extremely high performing. We hired some amazing people and great talent and so we were able to move very quickly um and so so that that really drove a lot of our success and what was it like like i guess building a platform like this was i think it's safe to say it's like your first software engineering gig and now you're building something that like presumably millions of people can be using concurrently because i'm thinking about nike is like nhl like store like yeah yeah yeah some interesting challenges that we had to like kind of um keep in mind even just from the beginning on how to architect so if you think about it there is certain times of the year that

are going to be super busy like obviously in e-commerce it's going to be um the holiday season a lot of people are going to be buying stuff then there's going to be huge days like black friday or cyber monday where there's going to be a ton of people coming to the website all day long um but but another unique thing about fanatics uh specifically was that you would have these spike events uh after huge sporting events so like it'd be the Super Bowl or you know game seven of the NBA finals uh and you know the Warriors win in in game six or game seven and uh and you'd have these insanely huge spikes right after the game while everyone is coming in to to buy the new hat or the new shirt for the celebrating the championship right and so it's kind of a

different um you know, a different way of thinking about how you need to scale because it wasn't scaled of like, hey, we just have a lot of customers coming in all the time and we need to be operating at that level of scale. That was also true, you know, on a regular basis, but it was like, how do you handle a massive spike where everyone is coming in and trying to buy something

in like a two minute period or three minute period after the game and then how do you like how do you get your products alive as soon as possible right after the game has ended right how do you compress that time from like we could publish the products we can publish the catalog we can publish all the content on the site and make those products visible how do we compress that time from being like five or 10 minutes after the game has ended to like one minute after the game has ended? And so those types of things were very interesting challenges that we had to figure out on the technical side as well.

Did you have an engineer on call after each game? Oh, yeah. We had whole teams that were on a call for you know some of these major events uh for like the super bowl for example uh for the last several years i was watching the super bowl pretty much with my teammates at work so it was it was kind of fun like uh you know we'd go into the office and you know um we'd uh we'd order food we'd have like wings and and uh and pizza and stuff like that come in and we'd watch the game together. And then at the end of the game, then it was like crunch time. And like we had to be ready.

And most of the time it was basically like, it's not like ideally nothing is actually going to happen. You're basically monitoring the system that you already set up ahead of time. But it was a pretty awesome learning experience going through those kind of crunch times. You can see how do things work at scale? How do things break down? What is potential hiccups or delays on logs and how much an effect that can have if you're five minutes behind on logs because they're backed up? How does that affect your real-time visibility into how things are going? And then how do you improve that over time? So there is a definitely a lot of definitely a lot of learnings from that.

Was there any like significant outage that you feel comfortable sharing? I think I can probably share this now, but this was this was Black Friday, I think, in 2016. So luckily, like after that, we didn't ever had any significant outages with black fridays 2016 we had an outage for i think like i think it was over an hour um and so it was really terrible um you know a terrible situation but like um we ended up obviously recovering after that and getting things back online. We recovered a lot of the sales in the next couple of days,

except extending the sale. But that was something that we had a lot of learnings from. It was basically a DNS routing issue where our internal services couldn't find each other. And to make matters worse, a lot of our cloud team was actually in Vegas that week for the AWSs conference so they were like coming out of the conferences and like in the hotel hallways like doing a doing these

calls and so but we were able to get things back up and running and and uh recovered the sales so that was that was good but it was definitely like a huge learning experience on like basically the rigor that we needed to have in terms of setting up the systems for these huge days or huge events like did it involve basically like i guess did the learnings involve things like load testing and stuff like that or was there something more interesting going on yeah yeah so it was a lot of basically redundancies building out redundancies in the system um checking the the failover paths. Obviously load testing we spent usually pretty much leading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

We spent most of November running like tons of different load testing scenarios. You know, especially with a service oriented architecture, you have a bunch of different services talking to each other. There's a lot of room for, you know know one thing drops or one thing has latency issues or is timing out that can have a lot of downstream impacts and so testing all those things understanding what the best um the the best scale of policies needed to be how many you know boxes we needed to have each service running uh optimally and so you're obviously kind of balancing we need to have some a level of redundancy and breathing room, while at the same time, you know, you're also trying to, you know, manage your costs, you're not trying to scale things to insane levels and pay for that for an entire month or anything like that. So. So yeah, that was, there's a lot of interesting challenges with that as well. It seems like there's a whole industry around chaos engineering and stuff that's come up which talks about this, but

I don't know how that industry is doing, especially with the whole tech downturn. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not too sure about in general industry-wide, but I know for us, that was something that we definitely built into our load testing

plans. And so we'd have I think other companies would call it chaos know for us that was something that we definitely like uh built into our load testing uh plans and so we'd have like i think other companies would call it like chaos monkeys and stuff like that but like we'd have like basically planned like if the service goes down like take it down in the load testing um uh lpt environment and then um and see what happens right like how quickly can you bring it back online like how does it affect all the other things that are happening throughout the system? Are you able to replay the order transactions or replay the history of logs or whatever else? And so there's definitely some interesting cases there. Would you call this role a more like infrastructural role?

Or are we just currently talking about the scaling challenges? Because I'm guessing there's a lot of product work involved right like in multi-currency support internationalization it seems like you had to think about the whole life cycle from like zero to like global scale e-commerce yeah yeah definitely the cool thing about like the team that I was on and the role that um you know part of being like an early member on the team was I got exposed to like a lot of these different areas so definitely was focused on more of the the consumer facing uh product side of things and so um i led the search and browse uh platform team um and uh and led the av experimentation team so everything that we were doing for ab experiments um testing out new

features that kind of went through my team and And so it's definitely more product focused. But my team had like very close, you know, involvement integration with a lot of these other things that other teams that were working on, you know, things like the infrastructure or the load and performance testing, because it was all obviously, you know, related to our consumer facing platform It's scalability. Learn a ton from working closely with those folks and then taking on certain challenges into my team. If we're talking about, obviously, load and performance testing,

if we're trying to work on something for Black Friday, the search and browse flows need to be working just as effectively. We need to be able to deliver and test things just as effectively at a high scale as we would on a regular Tuesday. So there's definitely a really close integration there. Yeah. So you've basically talked about a product role right in the beginning of your so-called tech career. Now you've gone through this whole experience of like consumer product working with like slightly more infrastructural teams you combine all of that and you kind of make this

decision of you know what i want to actually build something on my own how did that decision just come about yeah um yeah for sure so i think think the experience at Zenefits definitely instilled in me, like, I love startups, I wanted to, and I always thought, like, eventually, I'll start a company. And it was always like, you know, someday, like, yeah, it'll definitely happen at some point, right. And so in 2020, obviously, 2020 was a crazy year for all of us. And, and so it was like 2020 covid election um and i'd also just turned 30 years old and so that was also like for me like okay i'm 30 now like what's uh what's next and and so at 30 it was like okay that's someday i'm gonna start a company someday that kind of needed to happen soon or it might not happen at all um and so i remember very uh vividly like i took a hike in the marin headlands on uh election day 2020 and so we had the day off to go vote and everything and i'd already voted early um so i went to the marin headlands and went on a hike by myself. And I remember just journaling about the pros and cons of taking the leap to start a company. And the way that I think about it is either go start a company or maybe go work at an early stage breakout company, breakout startup again. And I remember basically the way that I thought about it was in terms of

Jeff Bezos has this good framework of thinking about the minimization of max regret. And so you're trying to minimize out of all the possible eventual futures, you want to minimize the max regret that you might have in your decision making. And so I kind of compared two scenarios there. One scenario is I go to start a company and it doesn't work out and everything fails and nothing really happens that is great. And I thought, well, even if that happens, in that worst case scenario, at least I took the shot. It's still very employable. I can still go work in an early stage startup,

a breakout company if I wanted to. And then in the flip scenario, I was thinking about, okay, so what if I do go to a breakout company right now, and it does really well. And a few years later, we've done really well, financially quite sound, doing well. And it'd be like, what do I want to do next? And I realized that in that scenario, my answer would probably be like, I'd want to start a company. And so I was like, okay, well,

if that's the way that I'm thinking about it, if like 50 years from now, I'm on my deathbed and thinking back, like what would be the thing I regret most? It'd be like, I did that. I didn't take the shot. Um, and so, so that was, that was what it always was. And so I was like, well, all right, if I should do it, like I figured I should just bite the bullet and do it now, if that was going to be the case. And so I applied to the on-deck program in December 2020. And so the OnDeck Founders Fellowship, it's a really great program that brings together people who are interested in starting a company. They might

be in a different stages. They might be, some people in the program are, you know, already have an idea that they're working on. Some people are more noodling on a few different things. And so I joined the program inary 2021 and heard really great things about the program from some friends and it ended up being a great choice obviously i i ended up meeting mike my co-founder the first day of the program we really hit it off started to get to know each other better he was already starting to work on this idea for traba and uh had had been kind of thinking about the space for a long time. He'd worked at a company called McMaster Car early in his career and saw this problem firsthand in light industrial

staffing. He was responsible for managing the staffing in their warehouses in LA and saw a lot of the problems that they had with working with these old school staffing agencies to fill roles. And so he then went to Uber, had an amazing experience at Uber launching markets across the US, Latin America. And combining those two is where he had the idea for Trava, like, why not build a labor marketplace that connects people to these flexible roles in warehouses, in distribution centers in a more efficient way. And so we ended up meeting through OnDeck. We really got to know each other, doing customer interviews together,

really diving into the space. And that's what really struck me is like, there's room for massive impact here. It's a massive, massive industry. And it's been typically overlooked by the technology industry and so that was something where i saw like it kind of drew parallels back to what i'd seen and some of the things that drove uh drove me at zenefits was seeing the impact that we could have through

technology in a space that was typically overlooked and in the zenefits case it was the hr and benefit space right It wasn't the way that most people had got insurance and worked with health insurance brokers. It was extremely broken, very low tech. And that was a case where we were able to see the impact that we could have in terms of streamlining a lot of that for small businesses and for their employees. And I saw a similar potential here for delivering the same kind of impact to these small to medium sized businesses in the light industrial space and to these workers who are relying on these old school staff

agencies waiting for like a phone call or going into a brick and mortar office to get dispatched to to a job where they don't really know anything about the company. They don't know how they're going to be treated. They don't know what the work's going to be like. And so there's a lot of potential for our technology to make an impact. And so that was really inspiring. Our customer interviews early on were very promising. We could definitely see this was a huge need and a massive space to tackle. And so we teamed up, we started building the early stages of the prototype. Mike and I went through a very extensive co-founder dating process. So we really dug into our goals for the company, our values, how we aligned on things and our skill sets.

I think it's important for co-founder matches to have like a good complementary skill set and we i think really had a good um a good complementary match of the skills that that we brought to the table um and so that's that's kind of where it uh where it started okay i think that's a lot of good information i want to start with right at the beginning right like the timeline so feb 2021 is when you said you started with the fellowship um were you still working full-time or is that when you're like yeah yeah i was still working at the time and so i basically went into the program thinking like one of my goals going into the program which i think i told i think at the beginning of the program you tell people like what are your goals for the end like what do you want to do in on deck and one of my

goals was i want to quit my job and start something by the time uh at the end of the program and so i very much went into it intentionally like this should happen and uh within the first like few weeks i was like yeah this is definitely gonna happen. I was loving the work that we were doing, the explorations that I was having into the different spaces, the conversations with other founders in the program, the talks that they brought in some really amazing people to tell us tell us more about, you know, company building strategies, fundraising, and all of these different topics. And it was very much the case of like, this is definitely the right choice. I definitely want to do this. And so then working with Mike, we continued obviously getting to get deeper on the journey of getting to know each other,

learn more about our customers together. And so I ended up pulling the trigger towards the, I think it was probably towards the beginning or middle of March. So probably four or five weeks into the program is when I went to my manager and said, like, hey, this is what I'm thinking. I'm going to be leaving at the end of uh at the end of march at the beginning of april um and so so yeah it was it was very much like a thought through like process i knew like this is kind of the goal going in was to to get to that point where i felt comfortable um taking the lead and was the program all remote or was it in person yeah so this was like obviously 2021 um it was still uh still covet times i guess for the most part and so um so yeah it was it was definitely a remote program they'd gone remote during during covid i think most of the the cohorts at that point had been remote so they'd

done a few before coven um but i think several that point, they've been doing remote cohorts for about a year. And so it was, it was actually a very smooth process. I still met with some folks and who are in San Francisco, where I was at the time. And so I met with some folks, you know, locally, the parks and stuff like that to get to know each other a little bit better. But the vast majority of all the events and icebreakers and everything else were all uh remote and but traba famously is completely in person and not remote at all it's like what's your what's your philosophy there yeah yeah yeah so we are we're definitely a fully in-person company and we really believe in the the

power of being in person. And so we actually saw this early on. I was in San Francisco, Mike was in Miami. And so I came out and we started working together and started building. And when I went back to San Francisco, it was the case like our communication wasn't the same. It wasn't the progress that we were able to make in a given day wasn't the same. And, and so it really made sense. And it was something that, you know, I think, like, if you had a conversation with anyone in like, even 2019, or 2018, about whether, you know, remote is going to be as effective as in person collaboration, I think everyone would say in person is better. And then I think during COVID, a lot of people obviously, by, you know, forced you had to be

remote, everyone went remote. And I think a lot of teams were still able to be productive and get their work done thanks to a lot of technology that, you know, we use every day. And I think a lot of people assumed that, oh, okay, in that case, like everyone can be remote, like, this is great. You know, we can do all the same things that we did. And I don't think that's true. I don't think the, that the tools that we have are quite there to match in person collaboration with being remote. And so we, we, we did, we saw that obviously, ourselves firsthand. And so we decided we're going to be fully in person as a company based in Miami. And so we've been growing the team fully in person. Everyone we've hired has been working with us in Miami. And we've really seen huge benefits in collaboration, in our communication,

in team building. So there just isn't a replacement for getting together around a whiteboard, hammering out on some product ideas, working on business acquisition strategies, or even just going over to someone's desk and, you know, asking them for a question or asking them for help on something. And so that's really been powerful and helping us move as quickly as we have. So we went from our seed round last summer to our Series A just a couple months ago. So just in about a year, we went from seed to Series A, and it made just massive, tremendous progress. And so I really think the in-person collaboration has been a huge part of that. And when we talk to candidates, obviously, a lot of people now are more, they're expecting remote as an option, or they're kind of predisposed to choosing remote.

And so we usually in those conversations with candidates, we really like to compare it to going to a grad school program. So if you were going to Harvard Law or you're going to Stanford Business School, right, would it be the same experience if you were doing it online over Zoom and just taking those classes? Or would you want to go on campus and meet your classmates and work side by side with them, get to know them really well, work on projects together, learn from your professors in person, go to office hours? It's obviously not the same. You would obviously want to do it on campus. And so we think of it the same way, like we're building a company and we want to do it together,

side by side in person. We want to learn from our investors when they swing by the office and jam with us on, you know, business acquisition or marketing strategies. Like we want to be able to do that together and have that communication and collaboration together.

And so that's definitely helped us a lot. And that, uh, I think that actually does resonate with a lot of, um, candidates that we talked to and that they, they kind of understand, oh yeah, that, that does kind of make sense. And, um, a lot of them are actually looking to go back to an in-person environment, right? They kind of miss being together, having that team camaraderie. And so a lot of people are actually looking for that. I think that's interesting. Like I'm a remote worker. So I certainly see both. And I was in person for all of my career before that. Like, do you, do you think that this, like, like the philosophy that you have is going to stay

the same, like assuming the company keeps like doing well that you have is going to stay the same? Assuming the company keeps doing well, you have to keep growing, your Series Bs and Series Cs and stuff, you probably will have to become multi-office at some point. I think there's definitely a difference between a distributed model and a remote model. And you could see this, pre-COVID, right? Pre-COVID, most companies that started out might start out in one location, and then eventually they got big enough that they would have different offices in different

locations and you would need to bridge that gap and you would have to have good lines of communication between different offices and make sure the culture was being carried forward. But this is obviously something we saw, like I saw in my previous roles, right? At the Zenefits, we had an office in San Francisco, and then we also had an office in Phoenix and Scottsdale. And so we had to manage that communication line, of course. At Fanatics, there were several offices. We had an office in the Bay Area.

We had an office in Jacksonville. We had an office in Boulder Bay Area. We had an office in Jacksonville. We had an office in Boulder. We had one in India. And so it was a very distributed, but it was still like in person. So in each of those offices, people were working together. And so I still think that is like

the best way to go right now. I don't think the remote tools have necessarily caught up yet to replicate it. But yeah, that's kind of how we're thinking about it going forward. Okay, I think it's going to be interesting. I have to say, I still disagree a little bit, but we'll see. We'll see how things work out. I certainly think that companies have, I think our thinking about this has evolved a lot

from what it used to be with 2019. And then I feel like definitely the pendulum swung way too far the other way with like everyone going remote thinking this is fine and then you find out you know we're not as effective we're just it's not the worst thing in the world like we can still get our jobs done it's just not that much fun and all that so it's not as good it's not the same and I think there's trade-offs yeah yeah there's definitely trade-offs you're making there where and all of that. So it's not as good. It's not the same. And I think there's, yeah, there's definitely trade offs you're making there where

you're obviously if you're remote, you're able to hire people from anywhere, right. And so it opens up the the hiring, your hiring ability significantly. And so that's definitely like a positive, but then there's some trade offs there you're making in terms of like, the collaboration you might have uh with your teammates and so it i think it also depends on what stage you're at as a company like what trade-offs you're willing to make right so like if you have like a much larger company and you have like a good um kind of framework and platform for communications and working together as a team and sharing documentation and everything else.

And I think in those cases, companies that are huge can definitely make remote work reasonably well. I think for early stage startups, especially if you're just starting, like for us, we were just starting out and building things from zero. I think it definitely helps a lot to be in the same room. Yeah. And maybe the final question on this whole idea is, how much do you think the nuances of how Trava, the kind of problems that Trava is solving, is affected by working in person or remotely? Do you feel like if I was just doing a tech company

that was completely different, it was like a pure tech that was completely different um it was like pure like a pure tech play versus travel which is that you have to think very specifically about locations about um certain things how much does that affect the whole yeah decision yeah that's yeah that's a good question um there is obviously for us there is very much like a location and geography component like being building the team together in miami we're able to actually go meet our customers, go talk to the workers on our platform. And that is, it's been huge. Like we'll sometimes it's actually kind of funny. Like we'll have sometimes when we'll go to a shift or, uh, and we get a call from a worker or a support

request and they're like, Hey, I'm like, I'm not sure where to go like where should i be we're just like oh walk over here and then you'll see the person in the travis shirt waving at you and they're like wait what like there's there's someone here from the company i thought you guys were like just some random you know people in california somewhere like we're like no no we're here in the parking lot right over here. Just walk a little bit further and you'll see us. So that's been really awesome. And we've been able to learn a lot from the customers by doing that. I think like in terms of your question, like a pure tech play, I think it might be a little bit better suited to being remote. I still think like early on, regardless of what you're building,

you're still trying to forge product market fit. You're trying to figure out the right direction to go. You're trying to build a team culture out of nothing, right? Like it's not like something existed there before. And I think all of those things are still easier to do in person. So I think, I don't think it's like impossible or like wrong to do it remote. I I think, I don't think it's like impossible or like wrong to do it remote. I think you have to be like extremely intentional about making an effort to bridge

those gaps that you have, that you have by virtue of being remote. And if you can do that effectively, like it's, you know, you're probably going to be fine. Uh, but you do have to be very intentional about doing that. Like you're not going to automatically have an extremely strong team culture um you know without putting effort towards it that's true in person too of course but like i think a lot of it just kind of happens naturally by being together in the same room with someone for like 12 13 hours a day right like you're just going to forge stronger bonds whereas if you're talking on slack for 12 hours a day it's not necessarily the same thing yeah and all of all of this discussion is centered about, can you ship product well enough in a good quality and quickly enough? I'm sure if you didn't care about taking a year longer to

deliver stuff, then you probably don't care. And we've learned from talking to you that you care about product velocity a lot. So one thing that you've thought about or you've talked about in the past is like the product momentum it's like why is that momentum important and like can you give me like an example of how you manage to ship something like so quickly such that you're doing your series a in less than a year after your seed round. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, so it's something that we think is extremely important. Product velocity is crucial.

And it really, like product velocity and momentum, it really builds on itself. So you want to keep the pedal down. You want to continue shipping because it continues to reap rewards on itself as you go. And so an example of that. So we launched last summer. So we basically got our seed round of funding from Founders Fund General Catalyst in June of last year, and we set an interview with the mayor of Miami on July 12th, and so we're going to do a cafecito chat on that date. It was already planned with the mayor's office.

Everything was already set. And we basically had about a month where we wanted to go from getting funded to actually launching publicly. And so we wanted to have our app live in the app store and Google play store. By the time we had the mayor interviews, we had just about a month to get our V1 of the app live in the stores at this time. And so that's a little quick. That's not too. or by the time we had the mayor interviews, we had just about a month to get our V1 of the app live in the stores at this time. And so that's a little quick, that's not too. Yeah, so it was, it was definitely, definitely a sprint, like we were working, you know,

crazy hours, we were, you know, working really hard on getting this thing delivered and going from zero to one on it. And I think it really set the early tone on like, this is how we want to operate, this is how we want to deliver. We ended up doing that again with our business-facing product. So we set a deadline again with that of launching by October 31st. This was after we'd finalized the designs around mid-September. So it was again, maybe like a five-week sprint to get it out. And we basically wanted to have it out for our customers, our business customers to start using it to book their shifts before going into the holiday season. And that was also just another sprint. We were working super hard on getting that shift and meeting that deadline.

And so I think those early successes and building the muscle for delivering at a really high velocity, it set the stage for our current velocity and how we've continued to build. And so we've really kept the pedal down and, you know, it instills urgency in the team. I think setting those ambitious goals, setting an ambitious goal and then hitting it, it really builds your morale and your belief. And momentum, morale, and belief are really everything at an early stage startup. It's just super important. And we've seen the impact of that too.

We've had several people that we've talked to, candidates and folks who joined the team, where the reason why they got interested in talking to us is after they heard about us, is they went and looked at our product and they said, wow, this is how much progress they've made in six months. This is how much progress they've made in a year. It's like, they must be moving super quickly. This must be a very talented team. And so that's what I mean by this compounding on itself. We want to have people saying the same thing a year from now or two years from now. this must be a very talented team. And so that's what I mean by this compounding on itself, right? We want to have people saying the same thing a year from now or two years from now to say that

this team builds and ships with urgency. And so for us, it's really about the way that I think about it is you want to question your self-imposed beliefs or limitations. You really want to ask yourself, like, why do I have this limitation? Why do I have this belief that this is a limitation? And can I test the limits of what is possible? Is there something more, something better or faster that I can do? Henry Ward at C at card he has this really good uh or at least i heard it from him that is really good phrasing around this he talks about the difference between leverage and efficiency so efficiency is like getting is basically like you have like a fixed output you're trying to reach and you're trying to minimize the amount of effort you need

to to put in to get to to the output right that's high efficiency like not too much effort and you're trying to minimize the amount of effort you need to put in to get to that output, right? That's high efficiency, like not too much effort and you get a high output. Whereas leverage is a little bit different. Leverage is for a fixed amount of input and effort that I'm putting in, how do I get the maximal outcome, right? How do I get the highest leverage possible for my work? And so for us, we definitely think about it in that sense. Like we are going to be working extremely hard and we're going to be shipping at high velocity, but how do possible for my work and so for us we definitely think about it in that in that sense like we are going to be working extremely hard and we're going to be shipping at high velocity but how do we maximize the leverage and output of what we're what we're doing okay um that's I think that is interesting what I'm hearing also is that maybe that's somewhat competitive nature from

right in the beginning of the interview. Like, do you think that has anything to do with just this whole mindset of like, let's deliver value as quickly as possible? Do you think this is just more of a combination of what you will learn throughout your later career? I think, yeah, I think that definitely ties in.

I think that, um, I think I learned a lot from, you know, those, I think obviously during your in. I think I learned a lot from those. I think, obviously, during your childhood, what you learn and what you do sets the foundation for the person you become later in life. And so I think you definitely have a point there. Both myself and my brother, we've been extremely competitive and, to succeed and to win since we were kids. And so I think that definitely has like carried over to today. And Mike is actually like the same

way. Like he, you know, also had, you know, he has several siblings. They were also competitive. He's a, he has a twin. And so there's always been like that sibling rivalry um and you know close bond that they have as well um and so we both kind of have that same um that same way of thinking about things and so we really want to we really want to compete we want to win we want to to go out and build the best possible team and the best possible product um to serve our customers and so i think that that definitely has carried forward from like those lessons from childhood. Yeah. A large part of product velocity is also not shipping things that are not necessary. You cannot afford to build something and then 5% of your user base

is at least in the beginning. Eventually, every incremental feature adds up to this monstrous complexity of things that your sales team can sell. But initially, you just need to ship the most useful things and make sure you're building something useful right so i mean i think there's a lot of literature and talks on how you know what you're building like whether you're building the right things or not but in your case specifically with trap right like this is a new product, as you mentioned,

there's not that many people in the technology space thinking about this. Your user base is slightly different from your standard people who use an app, right? For example, one thing you mentioned to me the last time we spoke was you had to make sure your app worked in like English and Spanish from like day one right uh what else was like absolutely critical to build right from the beginning yeah yeah I think I think this is um yeah it's it's a great point because it's it's super important to understand the customer needs um that matter the most and deliver against those. And so that was something that we recognized early on, like, hey, we're building our initial market here in Miami. Having Spanish support is going to be extremely important from day one.

And so we built that in. That was in the requirement from day one. When we launched on July 12th with the mayor interview, we were fully live in English and Spanish. And so it's really understanding what the customer needs are. And by staying close with them, by having those customer interviews, by getting feedback from them consistently, that is how you understand what the priorities are going to be. And luckily for us, it's definitely been no shortage of customer feedback in terms of what we can build. And so we have a lot of things that we have on the roadmap, things that we're working on right now that are driven from those customer requirements. I think a great example of this

would be how quickly we launched our Instant Pay feature in December of last year. So we basically use Stripe Connect to manage our payments and pay the workers. And so when we started, we built the integration and we were able to pay our workers basically within two days. So we process the payment the same day as the shift the money then goes out and as you know with the banking system it's t plus two for settlement so you get your money two days later and uh this is obviously an improvement over like you know a two week yeah a staffing agency is like a two-week pay period uh potentially, where you're getting a biweekly paycheck. And so this is already a huge improvement.

But what we saw with talking to our workers was that even getting it before two days would be even better. There are some people who wanted the money today. They wanted to be able to get groceries that evening. Some of them would use that money to get an Uber ride home instead of taking a bus if the shift ended at night. And it was something that was very crucial for them. And so we took this feedback to heart. We started building the Instant Pay feature

in late November, and we wanted to launch it before the holiday season. People wanted to get Instant Pay and then go buy a present for their family member. They should be able to do that. And so we built that feature within the next few weeks and launched it. And it was a huge, a huge win. It was a huge success, very well received by our workers because, and a lot of them,

we basically give them an option if they want to opt into it or not, because there is a small fee that, you know, Stripe charges with it. But a lot of them will opt into it because the, the urgency of needing that money soon is just super important. And so we were really proud of launching that feature. We launched it pretty much three months after we launched the company, three, four months after we launched the company in terms of operations. And it was just huge because looking at some of the competitors in the space, the other folks working on Blaper Marketplace, it usually takes them years to get to the point of actually being able to offer that instant pay reliably. And we did it in a way that we

were able to offer it and work with our workers on it, while also avoiding any risk of fraud or incorrect payments being made or anything else. And so that was, I think, a really good example of learning from your customers, understanding their needs and then prioritizing based on that. And I'm assuming you implemented it using like, so Stripe has a feature that helps you do that. And there's all of the implications around like fraud and stuff. Okay. So that's certainly like cool. Another thing I wanted to talk about was the competitors in the space

that you just mentioned, right? Like, I mean, I don't know the market or anything at all, but you can imagine you're competing with both traditional staffing firms as well as other technology players is my guess. And my guess is if your company is doing well and you can raise so quickly after your first round, there's going to be copycats,

there's going to be companies that basically are doing the exact same thing as you. How do you think about that do you think oh it's validation that we're doing well uh how do you think about you know like taking that into account into your product velocity and stuff like that yeah yeah yeah it's definitely an important um important thing to think about. The fact that this is a massive need is not obvious. It's very clear. Anytime you go outside, you go to a restaurant, you go somewhere else, you'll see the help wanted signs. You see in the New York Times, the the wall street journal like the labor shortages the folks that

you know companies that are trying to hire and not able to hire people it's definitely like something that is on a lot of people's minds and obviously it extends to our our space as well the verticals that we're tackling and so it's definitely you know something that people are very well aware of and there is competition in the space um and that does inform like how we want to operate right so in a couple ways obviously on the tech and product side it means that we need to move very quickly and we need to build a best-in-class product to to basically gain and retain our customers um and then it also applies on the you know the business side on the sales and expansion side like we need to move extremely quickly

in terms of taking market share, going into new geographies and expanding in order to compete, right? And so it's definitely very central there. The way that we think about it on the product side specifically, it kind of goes back to the momentum and compounding nature of things that I spoke about earlier.

So we really feel like if you could build the best possible product and service that solves your customers' needs and improve that over time, that advantage compounds to the point where it's hard to compete. And so obviously examples of this right like if you look at google search like it's extremely hard to compete with google search based on like the years and years and years of you know improvements that they've had and that's compounded on itself if you look at amazon's like logistics uh network right like that's extremely hard to compete with based on like what they've built out over time and so we we want to do the same thing by applying technology to this to this space right and it's not just in terms of like the more you know the things around uh making a marketplace building a connection um between a worker and a business it's more so like

can we better understand why a worker is a good fit for business and better match them? Can we understand how to make people more incentivized, more motivated to take roles, to manage their schedule, to work in a way that is beneficial for them, to help them upskill over time, to kind of drive progress in that way? Can we figure out ways to do that through our technology? And so those kinds of things are, you know, things that we're thinking about, that we're working on our roadmap, that we want to keep central to how we design the product, how we design the experience,

and kind of build that out over time. Okay. And I mean, a series A is just one milestone. A lot of people say like fundraising isn't something that should be celebrated. I think it is. I think getting extra money in the bank is never a bad thing. But what's next for you? Like, what are you thinking?

Like, I mean, clearly you're going multi-market, like you're tackling like more areas. What is the grand vision of this all? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So as you mentioned, like it's an exciting time for us right now. We're going into new markets.

We're going to be launching in Texas in the next, in the next month or so. And so that's, that's the exciting next step is going across the US. Like we're going to be expanding nationally. We're going to be building out new markets. On the product side, we want to continue to improve our ability to best match businesses with workers, to help workers upskill over time, to get access to higher paying roles, to kind of drive career progression within the space. We want to build out the best possible product for the businesses as well, for them to manage their shift requests, to have multi-tenant access for all the stakeholders that you might have in the business, like the person who's

managing the finances and invoices to the supervisor who needs to see who's showing up and when they're going to be arriving and clock them in and clock them out. We want to think about loyalty. So building out loyalty programs, both for workers and businesses. You know, there's so much, the way that I think about is like, there's so much that currently exists that is a gap between flexible staffing, temp staffing and full-time employment. And people, a lot of the folks that we work with, our customers, our workers, they're choosing the flexible work because of the flexibility, despite all those other gaps

that exist, right? And so what we want to do is continue to narrow that gap, to build out the features, build out the benefits that exist that you would get with traditional full-time work and be able to deliver it to our customer base while retaining the flexibility of setting your own schedule, picking up work when you want and when you want to work. And so that's kind of how we think about it. And then more like longer term, obviously we want to go international as the next step, but beyond that, we want to go global. This is a massive space across the world. It's not just a US problem, of course. We have a lot of folks on our team that were early Uber Eats and were launchers in Latin America. So we're really

excited about going into that market next and then globally after that. And then very long term, the way that we think about it, we want to be almost the AWS for labor. So you can think about it as any business that needs to be able to flex up and down in their workforce. They're able to plug in a Trava, build out this workforce as a service, and we can start laying around additional products, additional services into that model. There's a lot we can do as you think about like the data that we'll have on businesses as they increase their staffing requests as they grow over time, working with workers on more less so than on a job by job basis, but more on like, this is kind of your labor platform you can come to that you can continue to

upskill and learn new abilities and to to increase your earning potential over time and so that's that's kind of how we think about it longer term and and for that medium term vision right like the next year year and a half like what do you think are the biggest challenges you have to solve as like the cto of this company like how do you what do you think are the biggest challenges you have to solve as like the cto of this company like how do you what do you need what are the things that are top of mind for you that have to be solved to like move as quickly as you need to towards this vision yeah let's say that there's a couple things like one that's always top of mind is going to be hiring the best possible talent and continuing to build an amazing team um as we scale and and you know evolving our culture um as we continue to do that there's there's just an awesome team that we've built so far um our

engineering team really is top notch and i want to continue to maintain that level of quality maintain that level of uh you maintain that level of product velocity. And so hiring is going to be huge, like vetting for the right talent and building out a really awesome engineering organization. And then the additional step I would say is kind of going, taking that next step from the early marketplace tech to better understanding our workers and our businesses and driving the best quality matches. It should be the case that we are able to match businesses to workers at a higher fill rate than any other competitor. So we're able to, if you as a business want 10 workers, you get 10 workers showing up the next day. But not only that, we want to have

the best quality as well. So if you're able to get what you want in terms of that fill rate and get what you want in terms of that quality, there's no reason for you to use a competitive staffing agency. And so really building out on the tech side, what does that mean? How do we better understand what makes a worker reliable? How do we incentivize them to be more reliable? How do we understand what makes a worker reliable? How do we incentivize them to be more reliable? How do we understand what makes a worker high quality for a specific role? It's not going to be true for the same for every different role. And then how do we help them improve quality or gain new skills or gain a new certification that unlocks higher productivity or higher earning potential. And so those are some of the things that we're thinking about

that I'm keeping top of mind. Yeah, it sounds like you're solving a similar problem like the whole two-sided marketplace thing with Uber, but your problem is really more three-dimensional because it's not just are you good at driving and can you make sure you drive safely? But it's like, can you good at driving and can you make sure you drive safely but it's like can you do x versus y they can this worker actually is are they good at x but are they not good at y but that still means you should keep them for x on our platform so and

there's a cool there's a cool aspect of like career pathing as well in this space right if you think about it if you're driving for uber there isn't like there isn't an advanced version or like a new skill that you can get to or a higher earning potential you're just you're basically driving and you know the amount you make is based on how much you work and the rate is the rate that uber is kind of setting for you whereas in this space there are different roles there are roles that are higher skill that require you know you to work your way up to it that you have to maybe get a certification for. And so for us, we actually want to help enable people to drive that career path to earn those skills and earn a higher rate for their skill set. And it's really awesome that we can kind of build that into a technical product and deliver that so that we can actually help people achieve that potential. Do you foresee things like workers actually having managers on the platform that they're

matched to or like coaches or mentors and stuff like that at some point? Or is that too long term? Yeah. So it's funny that you bring that up. We actually have like roles on our platform for what we call shift leaders. So this is basically a person who's working through Trava, but they're basically the lead for that shift.

So some of the larger shifts, you might have lots of people there. And so we have someone who's kind of the main point of contact. Their job is to also work with the other folks on Trava to help them get up to speed on what they need to do for that role. They've worked at the business several times before

and so they know how things work. And so that's already been something we've seen where we've had workers go from being like, you know, a worker at a specific warehouse at a specific company. And then the business loves them, we are able to, you know, we really like the way that they communicate with us and with the business and other workers. And we say, hey, like, you know, we have an opportunity for being a shift leader. Is that something that, you know, we can open it up to you? And they're able to, you know, obviously get a higher rate by doing that role, but also learn new skills.

And so that's something that's been really awesome. And we've already seen that organically, that communication between workers on how do I become a shift leader? Like, what are the skills that I need to gain? And those are things where like, hey, those are things that we should be able to build into our product and help people do. Yeah, exactly.

So that's really exciting. Yeah, I mean, this feels like, I mean, it feels like a less dystopian version of Uber, right? Where you're completely stuck or like DoorDash drivers, like you're doing this one thing and even a year from now, you're doing this one thing and even a year from now you're doing the exact same thing this feels like you're actually helping people grow while you're solving a real problem yeah i mean my girlfriend's dad runs a duncan and they just

cannot find workers so yeah tell me when you expand to Illinois. Yeah, for sure. Might hit you up. Well, this has been a great conversation. I've learned a lot. Thank you so much

for being a guest. Awesome. Thank you. And I hope that within a year or two I can have you flick around the way you

tell me about coming to expect me.