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.