The Eric Ries Show How to Scale Trust Into a Billion Dollar Business | Ritu Narayan (Zum)
For this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sat down with Ritu Narayan, founder and CEO of Zum, which has had incredible success in the field of student transportation.
The company began as a private service to tackle a problem Ritu was facing herself: how to function as a working parent dealing with erratic pickup and drop-off schedules. Before long, it became clear that there was a far larger opportunity to change pretty much everything about how all kids get to and from school.
Pivoting to working with school districts and a fleet of electric buses, the company set out to “modernize student transportation to make it safe, sustainable, and accessible for all.”
To say it’s been a success is an understatement. Zum now serves thousands of schools in multiple states, and in February 2024, it hit unicorn status with a valuation of over a billion dollars. As Ritu says in our conversation, “the service is for everybody.”
We also talked about everything from carbon-neutral buses to cracking the procurement system of public school districts, the invaluable asset of parental peace of mind, scaling care, and more, including:
• How Ritu came to entrepreneurship
• Scaling trust
• How coming from the outside allowed the company to transform the industry
• Shifting from a B2C company to a B2B company
• Zum’s values: customer obsession, doing things the right way, thinking big and executing meticulously, and building better communities.
• How a clear mission makes alignment easier
• Zum’s “Five Step People Program” to reinforce culture and behaviors
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Where to find Ritu Narayan:
• X: https://x.com/ritun
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritunarayan/
• Zum: https://www.ridezum.com/
Where to find Eric:
• Newsletter: https://ericries.carrd.co/
• Podcast: https://ericriesshow.com/
• X: https://twitter.com/ericries
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theericriesshow
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In This Episode We Cover:
(00:31) Welcome to the Eric Ries Show
(01:09) Meet our guest Ritu Narayan
(04:32) Ritu describes how Zum has reinvented the school transportation field
(06:50) The Zum origin story
(08:01) Zum’s pivot from private service to school district partner
(11:17) Scrambling to meet the demand and understand the RFP process
(13:17) Zum’s amazing growth from one contract to unicorn
(19:48) How Ritu got started as an entrepreneur
(21:09) Being a woman engineer in her family, college and the workforce.
(22:06) How being a working parent showed her the multi-generational problem she wanted to solve
(27:59) Establishing trust and placing it at the center of the company
(33:28) Being a child-centric company
(35:13) The deep care that transportation directors showed towards their students
(40:00) The Zum pivot
(41:43) Reconciling long-term vision with a flexible strategy
(44:28) Expanding from private to public schools as the result of raising a round
(47:20) Shifting from B2C to B2B
(51:54) How gaining clarity of mission brings the right people into alignment
(55:01) Zum’s four pillar values and the narrative they uphold
(57:05) The five steps to restructuring the company after the pivot
(58:58) The value of Zum from the parent perspective
(1:02:05) Zum’s climate impact
(1:06:19) Reconciling the vision of sustainable transportation and equality with profit
(1:09:34) The advantages of tackling a huge problem instead of a narrow one
(1:13:08) Working with mission-aligned investors
(1:15:02) Ritu’s advice for founders who want to build purpose-driven companies that are also for-profit
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Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.