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 — Brought to you by: Mercury – The art of simplified finances. ⁠Learn more⁠. DigitalOcean – The cloud loved by developers and founders alike. ⁠Sign up⁠. Neo4j – The graph database and analytics leader. ⁠Learn more⁠. — 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  — 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 — Production and marketing by ⁠https://penname.co/⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email ⁠[email protected]⁠  Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.