This pivot helped a mom-turned-founder scale student transit - and transform lives for moms and kids

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they are tackling the world's toughest challenges.

In today's episode we talked to Ritu Narayan. She is the builder of a school bus startup who is modernizing one of the most overlooked transit systems in the United States. She'll tell us about that and the surprising transformation it can bring for moms and their kids.

Subscribe to Meet the Leader on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And please don't forget to rate and review us. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum and this is Meet the Leader.

Ritu Narayan, Zum it was an 'aha moment.' This problem is universal. This problem is generational. And I got curious: Why hasn't this been solved before?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader The classic yellow school bus is a fixture on American roads. It is the largest public transit system in the country, and it travels 6 million cumulative miles per year, all to transport 27 million children every day.

It's also wildly inefficient. Bus routes are long - sometimes an hour or more. And that all cuts into sleep or homework time. Working parents can't be sure if their kid made it to school on time, or if they even got home, and the stress of managing school logistics can wreak havoc on parents juggling work and family. Changes in schedules and the need to shuttle kids to after-school activities can be enough for some moms to decide this is just too much. They might need to pull back from the workforce.

Ritu Narayan faced this firsthand as a busy mom, and that challenge inspired her to found Zum. Now, it's a startup that digitizes school bus fleets, making them transparent and efficient. Zum provides an end-to-end solution for school districts with a fleet that can scale to match different-sized schools, routes optimize based on student location and traffic, alerts for parents, and a focus on getting kids to school on time.

In short, it modernizes an industry for the first time in nearly a century. doing for the school bus, what Uber did for the taxi.

She'll share more about how she built this platform and tool, and the unexpected ways it can help bridge opportunity gaps for kids and their parents. But first, she'll talk more about Zum and why she built it.

Ritu Narayan, Zum So Zum's story is actually tied very closely to my personal life. In 2013-14, I was working at eBay, on a very large scale technology platform and seeing every single industry around me getting transformed and disrupted. But when it came to picking up and dropping off my children to and from school, I was in the dark ages. I couldn't find the options that was safe, reliable and sustainable. And interestingly, my mom, who was an educator in India, had left a job for the exact same reason. And here I was sitting in Silicon Valley facing the exact same problem. It was an moment that this problem is universal and this problem is generational.

Every single family you talk to around the world, they face the same similar problem. And I got curious why has this problem not been solved before? So at Zum we tried to address this problem by using technology, by creating a platform which connects every single stakeholder, from students to parents to schools, to school districts to drivers to operations. Everybody can get the same data, and they have the complete safety and reliability and trust in the rides that are happening.

The second aspect of Zum is if you ever look at the children's transportation -- and for example, I'll give you a data point from US. In the US, student transportation is the largest mass transit system. 27 million kids commute twice daily, even on the next largest mass transit system, Airlines, 9 million people travel on any given day. That's the massive scale. And there are half a million school busses. Less than 2% of them are electrified. That means children are exposed to harmful emissions every single day.

And so we are modernizing this entire system by two things. First is digitization, as I talked about it. And second is electrification. We are bringing in an electric fleet and using this platform. We know when to charge the school busses, when to discharge them. And also creating a center of power and giving energy back to the grid. Giving not only helping with a healthier planet, healthier lives for the children, but also creating a grid resiliency center in the local communities.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Why do you think that it's not better known that in school busses and school commuters, that kids are commuters, and that's the biggest mass transit system in the U.S.? Why do you think that there's not more visibility on that fact?

Ritu Narayan, Zum In a way, it works so while the people haven't thought about changing it. It is a very antiquated system. For 80 years, the system hasn't changed. But kids today pretty much commute the same way. You probably you and I did, our grandparents did. It's a highly antiquated system with no technology, highly underutilized assets, very unsustainable assets. It is a matter of the time that this change had to come. And I'm glad Zum is bringing this change to the society.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader I think it's interesting that people don't think of kids as commuters. Is there a mindset shift that needs to be happening, not just from when we talk about mass transit? A lot of times people think municipalities, but maybe they need to be thinking, as you're saying, schools. You know, we need to be thinking about like, what are the biggest communities who are moving back and forth? Is that a big shift that you think people need to be making to sort of help us rethink mass transit?

Ritu Narayan, Zum Yes, absolutely. And one of the reasons I also think about is that the adults are not actually commuting in those systems, so they don't realize how inefficient those systems are, how much time kids are spending on the road, and how does it impact their day in terms of their preparation and readiness for the day? And it is a very neglected segment, but a very critical segment. It's a [painpoint] because every single day for 13 years of school, kids are on the road.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Let's talk a little bit about that, because some kids are on the road, sometimes for an hour, twice a day, you know, depending on how far their school is. What impact does that have on their opportunities, whether it is to rest and do homework at home, or to maybe participate in other activities that could help them later on? How does that impact their opportunities?

Ritu Narayan, Zum The commute times have very adverse effect on children's development. First of all, teachers tell us from the districts that kids who have the longer commute for the first period, they're completely lost. They're not prepared to be able to focus on their education. And in the afternoons and evenings, those kids are not able to participate in the afterschool program or focus on the homework because they are so tired by the time they're home. And one of the reasons for this long commute is also one size fits all and very unoptimized system. If you're able to optimize the system using the multi-size fleet, right size of the vehicle for the right size of the child's commute, you can significantly reduce the time that they are spending on the road.

One of the customers for us is Oakland Unified. It's a very large school district in California. And before we came in, 70% of the students were traveling more than an hour because everything was in pen and paper and highly unoptimized. And after Zum came in, less than 10% of students are traveling more than an hour. And surprisingly, teachers just immediately noticed the difference what it made in kids' lives.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You talked about the pressure that you felt in trying to find someone who was reliable, and somebody you could trust, and to get your kids where they needed to be. But a lot of people, they hear those words, and they may not understand the block and tackle of what that looks like on a busy day. You're working, and then you get a phone call that whoever can't do it. What is that like? Can you take us through what falls apart and why this is so difficult and how it impacts, in particular, a mother's opportunities to work?

Ritu Narayan, Zum People don't realize how important this daily logistics of the family, of taking children to school and after school activities has impact on the parents lives and ability to work, especially moms who end up taking most of the time nad that burden. 10 million moms in the US have already left the job because of this reason. And everything falls apart.

Like in my life, when my daughter's ride fell apart, everything fell apart. And you see that in the career ladder, people face difficulties in getting promoted because one of our early customers used to say, nobody notices I come in the office at 6 a.m., but everybody notices. I leave the office at 3 p.m.. That's the kind of impact the options for the commute for the students make. And when you get a reliable system, you can completely have a peace of mind and do jobs wherever you want.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader And I want to talk a little bit about the evolution of Zum. When it started, it was on-demand. We'll start with that. But you had kind of an on demand service at the very, very beginning. How did that walk and talk and then we can kind of talk about what it is now.

Ritu Narayan, Zum Zum's origin was parents could order Zum on an app they used to schedule at least a night before, and from there, the ride would come in a very highly trusted and certified driver would come in very similar to Uber or Lyft. What you're using and but very catered to the child's need.

And we had a massive technology platform built in order to be able to connect the drivers to the right kind of ride for the student to provide them a certainty, because we knew that the kids don't like change or the change of the drivers every single day. We had a concept of small pool of drivers where children could access their primary driver, and a small pool of drivers. There were a lot of complexities that were built into the tech platform in a way that parents would have peace of mind. And interestingly, parents in the early days used to tell me, wow, this is so phenomenal. It looks like a parent designed it. And we would be like, of course, "yes, the parent designed it."

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Tell me a little bit about what's the offer now because you're working with with school districts. And so you're able to scale these rides and more children can access them. How is the model different now.

Ritu Narayan, Zum In the early days, we went to the schools asking them, would you like to promote us to your parents because we know one of your parents is leaving the job and just doing this, this job, we could do it for them. And schools started asking us, why don't you do certain use cases for us? Because we have such a difficulty and we never found a platform like that. And that was our insight into an amazing market that we were not even thinking about. Like how school transportation is so broken and not changed in years and years.

What we started doing was we started taking 100% of schools and school district transportation at any given time. Think about it. For example, in San Francisco, we have 200 busses on the road in eight by eight mile radius. Every single street almost is covered by -- the same on L.A. it's 405 plus busses. So in any given city, that's the largest fleet. And tens and thousands of parents come on the platform immediately.

And you also have to think about the enterprise robustness of the platform, where districts are able to access us. The each district can have hundreds of schools. All the schools are able to access only their specific information, and parents are able to access only their information and their child's information.

So for us, it was a massive transformation. It's almost like Amazon kind of logistics in the background that happens as compared to the Uber I was describing earlier. That's a transformation the company had to go through to be able to serve the entire city in one go.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader A lot of times when people have conversations about labor scarcity, right, there's going to be long-term population declines and the workforce is going to be reshaped. And as a result, one of the jobs that they always mention is bus drivers, right? It'll be harder and harder to get bus drivers. In your mind, what do you see as the future for how technology will reshape that role, maybe in the next decade?

Ritu Narayan, Zum So if you may be aware, U.S. is facing a nationwide driver shortage, especially during the pandemic. People who are at the cusp of retirement took early retirements from school bus driving, and there was a massive shortage. And one of the reasons for shortage is also because new people were not getting attracted to the job. And that's one thing we change using the technology and EV buses. The new generation wants to work for this job and we started approaching them digitally.

So in the short and medium term, the solution for it is attracting the new talent and making sure the new age of people are wanting to work in this area,

In the longer term. Think of it like we're essentially asset agnostic. If tomorrow there's EV we can transform to EV, tomorrow the AVs [Autonomous Vehicles], you can transform to AVs and school transportation at some point in future would lend itself to those changes. But as long as you're building a robust platform with all the routes and the students' information and optimization around it, we will be able to basically change as the technology changes in that direction.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You're building this big platform, any startup, they're going to hit a wall. Was there a moment where you hit a wall and you're like, gosh, I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to get through it, Can you take us into one of those one of those little mini movies in your mind?

Ritu Narayan, Zum A pivot moment happened to me in 2019. We were extremely popular with parents and we were doing extremely well in a B2C model, but we were doing amazingly well in our school models. But we were growing extremely fast, and our largest contract within two years had become $1 million contract. And at that point, we faced a choice. Either we could be good at both the sides of the picture or we could be great at one. And it was such a hard transition for me because Direct to Parent was my origin story. That's where I saw the daily needs of the people getting solved. But I saw this massive opportunity out there where you could build a network right from the beginning and then solve the even bigger problem. And that was a very hard decision making process. It almost took me six plus months, but looking back, it seems like such a no brainer to do.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Was important, what was key to get through that? Was there one trait or one question that that kind of helped you sort of guide through that and navigate?

Ritu Narayan, Zum In the end, the most important and critical thing for me was two things. First is where would you make the larger impact the fastest? And the second important thing was who are your customers? And we realized that given the school transportation is such a massive system, you would make the largest impact immediately into the cities by taking over these districts and schools and working with them directly.

And the second part, I realized my narrative, even though it evolved in the end, we were still serving the parents, and we're still serving the children who. In need of the service, and once that fit into my mind, everything was very easy to resolve.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader So say in ten years, if you could scale this to your dream. What does that look like and what would be needed to do that.

Ritu Narayan, Zum In in our mind in the interim next 3 to 4 years, it's like 27 million kids in the United States traveling on electric vehicles. In the longer term across the world, across the globe, kids traveling in the most optimized, safe, reliable and sustainable fashion.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader What would be the before and after of that? So say, if we really do have this amazing transformation where all these kids are able to be safe and sustainable while they're able to get where they need to go, how is the world different? What does that look like on a block and tackle way for people's daily lives.

Ritu Narayan, Zum In people's daily life, the difference this transformation in the commute system for students will make is parents will have the peace of mind. They will be able to work wherever they want to work without worrying about their options falling apart. Children's health will not be impacted by the commute options. Everybody will have equitable and sustainable access to the transportation, and a child's day will not be impacted by doing long commutes or doing unsustainable diesel-fume commutes. So, in short, I'm expecting it to bring transformational changes to the parents' and students' and schools' lives.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader In your mind, what's something leaders should be prioritizing in 2024?

Ritu Narayan, Zum Agility is the number one thing. As you know, the change is the common word that's happening. We are at the cusp of transformation most in terms of the climate change as well as AI happening at a very fast pace and keeping an eye open and flying those to your area of business is super critical in these times of changes.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Is there a particular change that you think they should be focusing on first?

Ritu Narayan, Zum Climate change, I would say, is inevitable. It's going to happen. People may not realize how fast it is happening, and we are especially in the era where the young people who are born today, they're born in that era, they have seen wildfires, they've seen flooding, they've seen everything. For them, it's like the normal way of living. And for me, it is like tying that change in every company in the world is going to be a climate company, because they will have to think about the climate in the end and contribute to it. So I would highly encourage the leaders of today to be very perceptive about the climate change and how they can make the difference.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Is there a book that you recommend?

Ritu Narayan, Zum There are lots of books, and I'm an avid reader, especially of nonfiction and business, but there's one specific book by Clayton Christiansen, Innovator's Dilemma. We change everything in terms of my perspective of how you can bring innovation at scale to the world and how innovation can die. And I love that book.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader And if somebody were reading that, how would it change them?

Ritu Narayan, Zum The biggest thing you would realize is there is a cycle. There's a cycle of how innovations happen and the people who are existing players in the market, how they ignore the innovation because there's a whole cycle of first they laugh at you, market to you and then they compete with you, then they're super scared about you. And that's the exact phenomenon even via Zum facing from the legacy provider that's happening. And then you once you become big and you become a giant, you are also actually in the equal danger. If you don't take care of and look at the continuously evolving yourself. That's why there's so few companies in the world which continue to innovate year after year while others die.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader What is a piece of advice that you've been grateful for?

Ritu Narayan, Zum One of the things for me that my favorite quote is you can't be what you can't see, and I have followed it throughout my life in terms of being the role model for other people and cutting paths where there was no path, and I highly encourage other people to do the same.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader That was Ritu Narayan. Thanks so much to her, and thanks so much to you for listening. If you liked this week's episode, please let us know. Take a moment to rate and review. We would love to hear from you and make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me, with Jere Johansson and Taz Kelleher as editor, Gareth Nolan driving studio production. That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.