The future of School Bus Transportation: Challenges and Innovations | Keith Corso (#036)
Chapters:
- About personal journey – Keith Corso, BusRight [03:37]
- School bus in North America – BusRight [10:47]
- Future of School Transportation – Key Challenges [17:01]
- Improving School Transport and Driver Shortage Issues [27:07]
- Technology in School Transportation [31:06]
- Emerging Trends in School Transport – Zum and HopSkipDrive [36:41]
- New Business Model – Integration with Public Transit [40:25]
- Electrification of School Transportation [45:15]
- Key Entrepreneurial lessons [49:46]
- Fundraising tips and funding winter [55:03]
- When founder should stop the sale? [58:32]
Complete Transcript:
It’s worth remembering that putting a stranger in your car or putting a stranger on your couch or in a different room in your house was a crazy idea until the likes of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, et cetera. And so this idea of taking these really expensive fixed assets and giving them a new life is really exciting for us. And then creating revenue generating opportunities for an institution like a school district that previously is underfunded in many capacities is also very motivated.
Now this is not about using public transit buses. This is about using school buses that are not doing anything for 80% of their life and districts that need more revenue and bus drivers that are looking for more work and using technology to, on a driver app, basically give drivers the ability to choose what kind of work they want to do that week on that school bus. Do you want to transport students in the morning and then deliver packages in the afternoon and do a birthday party in the evening?
Welcome to the Mobility Innovators Podcast.
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Mobility Innovator Podcast. I’m your host, Jaspal Singh, Mobility Innovators Podcast invites key innovators in the transportation and logistics sector to share their experience and future forecast. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the school transportation market in North America.
Our today guest is a co-founder and CEO of BusRight. He ideated the company in the high school and built a foundation of the bus ride during his time at Northeastern University in Boston. BusRight is a technology startup reshaping the student transportation industry with its routing software, real-time GPS dynamic driver navigation via military gear tablet, and a bus tracking app for the parents.
He has held role on both sides of the venture ecosystem by serving as the president of an entrepreneur club in the college to working as an analyst at MassMutual Venture, a fellow for Underscore VC and venture director for region at DeepTech Hub.
I’m so happy to welcome Keith Corso, co-founder and CEO BusRight. Now it’s time to listen and learn.
Hello Keith. I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. I’m really looking forward to a discussion I mentioned to you. It’s so good to see we are connecting after two years, and I was following your journey throughout this period. It’s so impressive what you have built in last two years.
Thank you so much. And I know a lot has happened in the world of transportation, not just school bus transportation in the last few years. So hopefully we can learn from each other over the next hour or two.
That’s the purpose of this conversation, learning from each other. And why don’t we just kickstart with your personal journey.
It’s so impressive because you completed your Bachelor of Science in Finance from Northeastern University in Boston, and you work as an intern at MassMutual Venture. But after your graduation, a lot of people join a company as an employee, do job, but you decided to become an entrepreneur. You took a very unconventional path, I would say, or very risk taking or risk journey.
So I’m curious to know what motivated you to start company immediately after the college instead of taking experience and going into corporate. And also I’m very curious to find any interesting fact about you, which you haven’t published on the LinkedIn because you are quite public in that way. You post a lot of things on the LinkedIn, but anything you are still hiding from the public.
If I’m hiding it from the public, why would I share it here? No, I’m kidding. Well, it’s a loaded question, but I’ve spent the better part of my life learning about our nation’s largest mass transit system, which is school buses. In fact, during the second semester, my senior year in high school, I was able to pursue bus ride as my capstone project. So I left school 30 minutes early every day and was able to speak to bus drivers, routers, directors, dispatchers, superintendents, IT directors. It’s actually how I met my co-founder, which I’ll get to a little bit later on. But needless to say, the challenges that I experienced with my school bus growing up and the relationship I had with my bus driver, realizing just how the underbelly of our K 12 system is just crumbling and needs help prompted me again to pursue this as my capstone in high school.
And then these conversations got me even more excited about supporting the transportation directors, routers, dispatchers, and many other stakeholders that are involved in this logistics business that is practically run in the basement of these school districts. Now, the only reason that I went to Northeastern University was to build BusRight. In fact, I remember I got the admitted students day agenda and there was only one event that I went to at Northeastern, which was the Husky Startup Challenge introduction workshop. And so for an hour I was able to learn from the directors of that program, learn about the entrepreneurship ecosystem, not only at Northeastern but also the broader Boston ecosystem and just realize this is an unbelievable place to build a company and meet potential future team members and investors and so on. So found myself at Northeastern first semester. I dove right into the Husky Startup Challenge, was fortunate enough to place first in that and got a $2,500 check.
It was more money than I could ever imagine, and that really was our launchpad to continue to build the business and having the conviction and the confidence to pursue this all throughout college. And since graduating accordingly. Now going to Northeastern, not only was it a great breeding ground for building the business directly, but I knew there were so many other facets of operating a startup in particular that I would need to learn. And so ended up being the president of the Entrepreneur’s Club, the largest club on campus analyst at MassMutual Ventures during Northeastern’s six months co-op program, venture director for Origin, which is Northeastern’s DeepTech hub. And again, just wanted to educate myself on all the aspects of the startup ecosystem and the venture building process so I could be more effective as an operator as the days went by. And of course, as graduation came around and when I dove into BusRight more full-time. Now that doesn’t exactly answer your question about what motivated me to start BusRight? But I think that in startup world we often talk about product market fit
Basically to the listeners that don’t know what that is. When you reach Product-Market fit, it’s that you’ve built a product that actually has some repeatable demand, meaning you are selling that product ideally not only the founder is selling and you’re able to close meaningful revenue, call it at least $50,000 in new Annual Recurring Revenue ARR every month. Though depending on the business, that number can shift. Now I like to think about Motivation-Stage fit. It doesn’t quite ring like product market fit, but founders might build a business for one reason and because the challenges that they work on change dramatically every several months.
Because the business and the product evolves so fast, your motivation has to evolve with the stage that your business is at. You might get started for a very specific narrow reason because you want to solve X problem, but now you’re running a much bigger operation, your work is wildly different. The product has iterated and pivoted several times over. So how do you continue to find motivation? And frankly, it’s never a guarantee that you’re going to have that motivation stage fit as the company evolves. Now with all that to say, I think for me there’s three main categories of motivation. Number one, serving people who have been neglected by technology and are severely underserved and underappreciated. The routers, the directors, the drivers and everyone else involved in student transportation, they work all day, all night long. They’re usually there on the weekends and most people don’t even know that they exist.
And so making their lives easier, making them the heroes that they are in their community just brings myself and the rest of our team a ton of joy and fulfillment. Number two is team. As far as motivation, this can’t be a motivator early on because it’s just yourself and maybe a couple of other folks. However, as you start to hire and work with people who are significantly smarter than you and who are experts in their craft and start to make the company their own, to me it’s a truly a magical moment. And so in that vein, what motivates me is seeing how a bus rate can be a launchpad for people’s careers and frankly, lifelong friendships. So I’ll wrap up here in 30 seconds, but the third I would say it’d be ridiculous if I didn’t mention financial freedom for an entrepreneur as being a key motivator. If you’re building a company to first and foremost acquire significant wealth, I think you have the wrong idea. The probability of creating general wealth, generational wealth from building a startup is very slim. But many entrepreneurs are fueled by this possibility so they can continue to build, operate, or invest more into their current venture or future businesses with a lot less constraints. So those are a few answers there. I know I didn’t touch on every single one of those, but I’ll pause.
These are great point. I’m so impressed because something which you mentioned about Motivation-Stage fit, it’s very true because a lot of time founders start with some idea, but then there is a fatigue come into the picture and then they fizzle out. So you have to find a new motivation at every stage and what you mentioned about serving the client and then team and then financial freedom. So there are different stage of it and it’s great to see how did you actually choose your college to build your company? It’s not other way around. It’s not that you went to the college and you build the company, but you actually decided to pick this Northeastern college because you want to build your company. So you were so passionate from the college.
So why don’t we now discuss your venture BusRight? It’s an exciting name. Can you tell me more about what your venture all about? Because you a little bit mentioned about school bus transportation and I love your point about it’s a national big or national mass transit system, which is serving so many people. Why did you launch this startup in the school bus space? Because you mentioned you did the Keystone project, but what struck you there and you said, okay man, I need to solve this problem.
Yeah, definitely. So I left that on a cliffhanger intentionally. I had figured that got around here, so thank you tee me up. So my bus driver, joy was one of my best friends growing up. And when Joy retired, I watched as substitute driver after new driver would jump into that school bus. And they’re staring at these physical paper route sheets that you’re probably familiar with having studied space. These route sheets are you have 10 point font with stop notes and directions written on a piece of paper, maybe typed out if you’re lucky. And at six o’clock in the morning in New York it’s pitch blackout and you have to match that 10 point font to a mailbox number that’s probably hidden behind a bush or a tree anyway, and you’re transporting our nation’s most precious cargo. And so after my stop was skipped so many days in a row while also trying to figure out how am I going to get to school and then also watch as these drivers would just quit and they kept leaving the industry, I realized that it wasn’t the driver’s fault that student transportation was failing in our community. It was more they didn’t have the right resources and tooling to do what they do best, which in my opinion is focusing on the road ahead of them and building relationships with those kiddos on the bus.
They should not be fumbling with these paper route sheets that have known to fly out the window or to be sweaty under their lap or whatnot. And so needless to say, it was this early observation of these paper route sheets that led me down this path of realizing how archaic, how static and inefficient this transit system truly is and just how much of an impact we can have if we built a driver app that runs on a tablet that provides drivers with safe and reliable turn by turn directions that’s engineered for a school bus asset. So, any driver including the two of us can jump on any route that has a BusRight tablet on it, on the bus, in any state that we’re in
And now what we’re going to get those kiddos to school safely and efficiently every day. And so we really started with that idea of just empowering drivers and we pride ourselves on being the only company in the market that started and still remains their core focus of empowering drivers because when you do that, you really impact everyone else in the community, whether it’s the folks in the transportation office, parents school administration, et cetera. Now as we started working with those drivers, the director, the router, the dispatcher said, well, I want to be able to see where my buses drivers and kiddos are in real time. I want to be able to build those routes in under 60 seconds. I want to predict and see what time this bus is going to arrive at any future.
I no longer want hundreds of parents calling me every day wondering where their child is. And as we just kept building BusRight, we started unpacking more and more challenges that were plaguing our largest mass transit system and we kept building technology to make those folks in that office the heroes that they are by enabling them to do what they do best. So it’s a long-winded answer to a short question, but that’s one of the couple of ways that we got excited about bus ride. I’ll add another layer onto this. So when I was pursuing BusRight as a capstone project in high school, one of the folks that I spoke to was a guy by the name of Phil Dunn. He was a CIO and tech director for Stanford Public Schools. And the week before I met him, he had spent $70,000 on a traffic study just to figure out how to optimize their bus routes.
And they had people just holding these clickers at different bus stops at intersections and that was their way of creating this optimization study. Not only that, but he was one of the top 10 largest customers of the incumbent routing company in the industry. And then on top of that, what stood out to me was just Phil’s connection to this problem. He grew up in the Bronx when it had the highest primary rate in the country and he credits a school bus route for transporting him to a district outside of the Bronx, which ultimately enabled him to go study at Cornell, Columbia Law School. And just this whole notion that a school bus is so much more than our mode of transportation is school, but it really opens up opportunity when you think about it in a different light. So both of us have kind of come at this, he’s now my co-founder just to seal the envelope on that. And the two of us have been building BusRight to give school buses I think a different life.
It’s a perfect combination of energy and expertise. I would say he has that expertise and you brought that energy and passion into the business. That’s very interesting what you mentioned about the BusRight, how you are focusing on empowering driver because that’s a key that they are the person who are on the road helping kids to reach the school on time and they need to face a lot of these challenges. So how to make their job easier. Once their job easier, everybody else’s job will get easier. So that’s great. You are mentioning this point about largest miles transit system in the country, and it’s very true because when I was checking the data in US alone, there are 50 million K 12 students in public school and there are 5.8 million in private school. So it’s in total it’s like 57 million students or kids which need to be transport every day.
And it play a very important role. Like you mentioned, they are carrying the most precious cargo in the country. So I like that point because it’s like they are carrying the future of the country and providing access to education. What are the key challenge you see the school transportation phase because when you did the keystone projector, now also you are working in this space, what are the challenges you see and how you see technology can help to solve some of these challenges? Something you already alluded about removing the paper and providing more real-time data, but what are the key challenges you see broader level and how technology is helping to solve that?
Yeah, so number one, driver shortage. Number two, overwhelming parent demands. Number three, increasing route complexity to someone that doesn’t spend their life in this industry. What does that actually mean?
Driver shortage. So I’d say any of our customers across the country on any given day have somewhere between 10 to 30% fewer drivers than they need to transport their students. And oftentimes they don’t know what drivers at three in the morning are going to call out that day because they’re sick or they’re driving a bus, a part-time job or for many other reasons. Now understanding why the driver shortage in this industry is so acute is critical. So in no order of importance during covid, a lot of these drivers, the average age of the school bus driver is over 60 and a lot of them drove a school bus for retirement or they drove a school bus because it was fun. And they like building relationships with those kids when Covid hits, if they’re retired and they’re that age and they don’t necessarily need the money, it’s not worth the health risk. And it used to be a very fun job building relationships with students. But during Covid, they’re now behind a glass wall and their students are wearing masks and frankly, mental health has been a significant challenge. And building relationships with those kiddos during such a difficult time when they’re totally sheltered and isolated was very challenging for a bus driver. So that’s number one.
Number two, if you have s CDL commercial driver’s license, you make the least amount of money as a school bus driver than any other job on the market. Why won’t you work at Amazon or Uber or name any other last mile delivery, et cetera job that you can do with a CDL? You’ll make more and there’s less certifications and hoops that you have to jump through. So it takes a lot more effort to be a bus driver and get your CDL, but you’re paid less.
So when you layer those things together along with the final reason in my opinion, which is this compounds meaning when there’s fewer drivers, the drivers who are left in that fleet, their job and the pressure they have on the job increased dramatically. If you are driving a bus and there’s a hundred buses in your fleet, you want a hundred drivers, you actually want a 105-110 for spares, but you want a hundred drivers. If there’s 70 that show up tomorrow, all of a sudden the director has now given you multiple paper route sheets for you to ultimately have no idea where you’re going, parents yelling at you all day long, calling the transportation office saying you have no idea what you’re doing, you should be fired. So these drivers are under even more pressure making the job even less fulfilling and all that to say, when again you layer all these things on top of each other, you get to a place where we’re at BusRight now where districts like the largest one in Kentucky just have to close down school for the first week of school because of how difficult the driver shortage is by and large.
And that’s number one. Number two is overwhelming parent demands. What happens when there’s 70 drivers, when there should be a hundred?
Well, you’re late to a lot of those bus stops, those parents are late to work, worse off, you don’t even get to those bus stops, those kids can’t even get to school. And oftentimes in communities that there isn’t someone at home that’s either a caregiver or there to take care of the child full time or children full time, how does that child actually get to school? So it creates even more demands there and nerves for those parents when they can’t rely on that transportation system. The implications are districts like Boston Public Schools end up spending over $600,000 a year for their call center just in their transportation office. So I’ve met the 28 folks that sit around a big oval table and they pick up the phone from angry parents wondering where their child is, how they’re going to get to school, and you can’t even believe some of the concerns these folks have that are just happening every day in plain sight. Right?
Yeah.
Finally increasing route complexity. So in an era where more and more students have IEPs, individualized education plans or special need requirements or split custody arrangements because they’re to divorce and now they have to go to different parents’ homes on different days plus grandma’s house on every other Wednesday plus the YMCA on the first Wednesday of every month when it’s cold out. I’m kidding with that last one. But all that to say, you have so many competing variables that make routing incredibly complex and in this era, parents demand that level of personalization, which doesn’t work with the current model of transportation. That’s largely pen and paper map on a wall with pins with string connecting it and or archaic technology that was built several decades ago that takes six to nine months to learn. So where does technology actually fit into that? With a driver shortage, you can put a tablet on each bus. So regardless of what drivers show up, they at least know exactly where they’re going, who they’re picking up, et cetera with overwhelming parent demands, give them a parent at so they know exactly where that bus is and they get live ETA updates accordingly
With increasing route complexity, build routing technology so that they can easily ingest all of the new students into their routing system and then easily place them on different stops and routes accordingly. That’s not on a paper map, on a wall or so on. So it’s not as easy as I just made it out to scene, but there’s a lot that technology can do to tackle a lot of those issues and come back to making those folks in the office do what they do best and the heroes that they are.
I must confess something before this discussion, I used to feel that public transit is more complex than school transportation. And I used to feel school transportation is easy. You just run buses to route pick up and drop and then it’s done. But after your point now I feel like, man, your job is even tougher than what the public transportation system do because they’re just running the same route every day through and fourth. And for you, the kind of variable you mentioned about split custody, peak days are different. The driver shortest 10 to 30%, which is I think a norm right now. You want to say add something?
Yeah, no, no, sorry to cut you off there, but we haven’t even gotten to the students that have allergies, students that sit next to a specific student, students that require wheelchair accessible vehicles. We haven’t even talked about the issue around maintaining buses. We at BusRight? Don’t focus on much of that right now, but these school districts have full-time teams of mechanics because buses are constantly breaking down. I was just spending the day in New Jersey yesterday with one of several of our customers, but one where they had several buses break down at one moment and they didn’t have enough buses for the mechanics to bring new buses to that site. It was pouring rain. How are you going to transport these students? How do you notify parents that were now delayed and on another road the tree fell down? So those parents also need to know, but they don’t even know who’s on the bus. So all that to say, the complexities are enormous and when you layer on again all the competing demands and challenges, it just becomes a really big headache for school districts.
And also I think the biggest complexity is that these are small kids, so then safety became much more important. It’s not just like they’re adult and they can take care of things like you mentioned, if the buses delay, everybody will get panic. It’s like where the kids are and then the payments also need to plan their day, they need to leave for the job, they need to pick up their kids. So it’s complex, you’re doing great job and the driver shortage, I think one point you mentioned, which I never thought about, which is like aha moment for me when you said the mental health of drivers and the drivers were doing this job because they were social animals and they want to interact with kids, but now they are in a small different glass and the kids are away and there is not much interaction and I think it’s happening in all kind of mobility system when the interaction is reducing.
So driving is not fun anymore and mental health issues are coming, and it became less and less attractive. So it’s a very good point, which I never thought can be one of the reason for the driver shortage. So thanks for sharing that.
Now the second big challenge like you mentioned the school bus districts are facing is the cost, the breakdowns and the operation and maintainers, they need to pay extra money to the drivers to attract them because if there’s a driver shortage, they’re giving bonuses, sign up bonuses and all. So there is also a pressure on the school bus because there is a reduced funding now that to reduce the transportation cost and improve efficiency and it’s like competing factor how are using, like you mentioned about your goal should be to fill more and more seat in the bus so that you can reduce the cost and you also want to increase the on-time performance because that’s only drive the customer satisfaction. And you mentioned 600,000 for call center, that’s too much, but you have so many calls, but if your on-time performance will improve, those customer call will be reduced. So how you are using the seed utilization data and level of on-time performance to improving the efficiency, I would say scheduling efficiency as well as improving the satisfaction level of the customer.
So I’m going to take this answer in a different direction, which is our focus isn’t as much on seat utilization, rather ensuring that every student, regardless of their unique transportation needs, has the ability to access their education every day. So what does that actually mean?
Tactically, it’s really pie in the sky and it’s really nice to think about, on seat utilization and fuel efficiency, et cetera. But we’re so far from being able to think about the icing on the cake. We just need to get to a place where districts can rely on transportation to get kids to school. What we do is every school district in the US has an assistant a student information system for folks that know what a CRM is, the customer relationship management platform that has all the information about your customers and prospects, et cetera. It’s basically that. But for students at a school they know you, your parents split custody arrangements, special need requirements, what homeroom you’re in, the list goes on. And so we ingest all of that into bus ride every night for all of our customers so that our customers can make sense of, oh, I have five new students in the district, these five need a wheelchair accessible vehicle.
I have three students that enter the district, these three need X, Y, Z. So we basically break down what work do they need to do to route what students and then display those routes accordingly so they can easily assign them to existing stops or create new ones in an efficient manner. Now historically when you’re on pen and paper, you don’t know all of these different variables. With technology now you can actually understand each student’s transportation needs and make sure they’re being met and they’re placed on a route. And the second you click save and bus write, it automatically shows up on that tablet literally with one second with a driver that they can just click start navigation. So I come back to your question of seat utilization, fuel efficiency, we are very excited about the work that we’re doing in that vein. However, our calling first and foremost is making sure students have access to their education and districts can rely on their transportation system. And that comes down to ingesting data and making it very easily understandable if that’s even a word for the folks in the transportation office and therefore show up on the right tablet at the right time for the right driver so they pick up the right student and get them to school.
Yeah, I mean I agree with you and I correct myself because that’s more important. That should be the service motto is how the student can reach on time and have access to the classroom and school rather than just focusing on fulling all the seat. But at the same time, once your service level improve, it’s like a consequence of that. So once your service performance will improve, a lot of student will start relying on the buses and the things will start getting better down. Now your implementing new technology in school district, and I know they are your prime target, but other side is it can be very challenging because they are not equipped with everything and implementing any new technology required a lot of change management and process and rethinking. What are some common challenges school district might face when they adopt bus ride system because it’s a new technology for them. So do they need any training and how does the company help them to overcome those challenges? And if I may add, I would love to hear some case studies where you actually went to some school district and you find system is in not very good shape and with the technology now they’re doing much better or improve everything.
So the chaos that we’ve been discussing here for the last 37 minutes in the world of student transportation both helps and hurts a company like BusRight in that it makes the needs more apparent not only the transportation but the rest of the district and community. So the funding and the motivation to solve those problems is heightened. However, the reality is that the driver shortage is so difficult that most of the folks in the transportation office that would be responsible for routing dispatch, parent communication, implementing an onboarding with BusRight? Those folks are oftentimes having to drive most of the week if not every day.
How do you successfully roll out new technology across several stakeholders when the folks responsible for championing that project are constantly running around with their hair on fire? That’s the biggest challenge for us. When you talk about what are the issues of adopting a product like BusRight? How do we overcome that? Well constantly focus on simplicity.
We pride ourselves on the ability for anyone regardless of your level of tech savviness to learn BusRight And under 15 minutes. And every important thing in bus write, whether it’s an action or an insight that you want to gather is usually two clicks from the home screen. You want to see where all of your buses are right now it’s one click from the home screen on our live map you want to build a new route from scratch, one click away from the home screen. You want to communicate with parents, the bus is running late, it’s one click from the home screen.
So we try to make the product super simple so anyone can learn it because these folks don’t have time to sit through hours and hours of training. So that’s one way that we try to help. The other way is, and then back to your other question of case studies and stories, there’s a couple that kind of stick out as I’m thinking out loud here. One is when I get to visit transportation sites where certain drivers like English isn’t their first language and now they’re so much more confident and comfortable taking on new work, whether it’s field trips, sporting events, being okay with their routes being merged because now they can just click start navigation and get those directions that are built directly for a school bus and their route. That’s really empowering. Now they don’t have to do dry runs for several weeks to feel comfortable and confident.
It’s all just one click away on that tablet. The second story that I’ll share that comes top of mind here is when we’ve had parents reach out and they’re like their kids use their parent app, the kids use it every morning because now they can figure out their own schedule of when they should arrive at the bus stop. And we had this one parent that was a teacher at a nearby district and her two daughters used bus strip to walk out. They were in middle school for the first time ever without their parent. They knew exactly when the bus was coming. And she said to me that level of independence that they can find because of a tool like bus strip is just so inspiring for her. So all that to say, when you see these different stories of how your product is being used above and beyond what you could even imagine that is coming back to your first question of our discussion, A huge motivator for myself.
Yeah, these are really inspiring stories or I would say the examples of how technology can make your life easier. And I love your point about not spending time on training but making the product so easy that they can just onboard in 15 minutes. Because sometime we make systems so complex that it need hours and hours of training. And you rightly mentioned, when there is a fire on their hair, they can’t just focus on and sit in the room and learn. So they need quick solution and that’s what you’re doing. And solving that, giving confidence to driver that I don’t need to worry about new route or new pickup and they will go in a happy mood if I’m struggling to find a route or bus stop, I will be in stress and then you will not focus on your job. But if you empower them to make your life easier, they’ll be happy and go.
So that’s a nice point. Thanks Keith for sharing that. Now let’s discuss about the alternative to school buses because it’s a huge market and there is not much innovation was happening, but we saw recently some of the new startup like Zum and HopSkipDrive, they tried to become Uber for school students and Uber for student. They try to offer ride sharing services for kids, but both the company have pivoted their model and recently both of them raised a big funding round in last 15 months. They are kind of also tackling this problem in a different way.
Jaspal Singh [00:36:13]:
I think they are kind of bit of a competition to you at the same time they can be collaborative. I don’t know, you can tell me better, but how do you see this space will evolve in coming year because we didn’t see much of disruption in the school bus space for a long time. And what are some of the emerging trends you are seeing or you are betting on, you feel like, okay, these are the trends for next five to 10 years, which will be important for bus ride and for you as to build the company?
Yeah, so when we started BusRight and we were building a driver app that would run on a tablet that would be a fixed to the dashboard of a bus. It was illegal to put a tablet on a bus. So when you talk about what are we betting on, we bet the house that we were building a product that was illegal and it takes a level of conviction and confidence to do something that is illegal and in an industry that has not changed in so many ways, especially from a regulatory perspective. So needless to say, not only is it not illegal now, but there are states that are funding our customers to buy our technology because of how much safer and more efficient they deem that driver app to be than outdated and static paper route sheets.
So needless to say, we took a bet several years ago and it’s been exciting to see regulation catch up to what is truly better for these communities and what’s better for these transportation teams. Now our bet in that vein was we want to empower these existing fleets because most of our customers are frankly in the middle of super rural Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, the list goes on many states where there’s not a whole lot of demand for public transit routes or other transportation systems or Uber or Lyft or other transportation work that would make a more multimodal system work well like it might in a city. So our whole goal was how do we just empower that existing fleet with technology so that they can operate more efficiently and safely. So needless to say, the bet that we made was partly two-fold. One tablets that would power those drivers and two, we’re not going to change the actual mechanics of the fleet itself and the structure of the fleet.
We’re going to make those vehicles and those people a lot more efficient and better at what they already do. Now in that Veeam, one of the other trends that we’re betting on is in the future the consolidation of fleet management, primarily school districts. So you have these routers and dispatchers and directors that are constantly driving and they don’t have enough bandwidth to truly serve in that role. Unfortunately, we believe in a vision where you can have a couple master routers and one director and maybe a couple of secretaries that can manage a much larger portfolio of school bus district owned fleets. And I know we’re seeing consolidation in UR as well on the private bus contractor side, but we want to bring that level of consolidation and efficiency to these school districts via technology so that it’s not about taking away jobs, it’s about helping solve the challenges in an existing labor shortage market.
That’s interesting and I think there is opportunity because sometime I feel there is a lot of duplication of resources at the same time there is less resources available at the school district level. So if you can combine and consolidate some of these resources, actually you can serve the students better way, the driver shortage can be reduced. And then I don’t know if you’re also planning to have the same bus can pick up the different school students, they can pick students from the different schools. That’s also your vision. That’s also the play you want to do.
We want to do a lot of things. I mean we have a vision of repurposing school buses so that in the 80% of the time that they’re sitting there doing nothing, they can actually turn into public transit that didn’t exist. They can turn into last mile, they can turn into charter vehicles. And so it’s again, it’s all about taking that school bus and giving it a new life, not only making it more efficient and safe for its current mode of transportation, but also using these vehicles as a means of revenue generation for districts so they can funnel it back into the classroom, which is where it should be in the first place.
That’s something very interesting you mentioned because that’s a lot of debate I had with some of the agencies and it’s a two-way debate because in some country I have seen the public transport operator provide the school bus service in the morning and then they take those buses back into the regular route. And I’ve seen in some city they have a separate fleet like in Middle East and in US you have a two different fleet for school buses and public transit. And like you rightly mentioned, school buses are not being used throughout the day. Their time span is four – five hours morning and in the afternoon and in between they’re free and in the evening they’re free and it can be opportunity, but how do you see that will be possible? Who need to come forward? Will the school district will use the buses owned by them or will the public transport how the partnership can happen?
So it’s worth remembering that putting a stranger in your car or putting a stranger on your couch or in a different room in your house was a crazy idea until the likes of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, et cetera. And so this idea of taking these really expensive fixed assets and giving them a new life is really exciting for us. And then creating revenue generating opportunities for an institution like a school district that previously is underfunded in many capacities is also very motivating. Now this is, this is not about using public transit buses. This is about using school buses that are not doing anything for 80% of their life and districts that need more revenue and bus drivers that are looking for more work and using technology to on a driver app basically give drivers the ability to choose what kind of work they want to do that week on that school bus. Do you want to transport students in the morning and then deliver packages in the afternoon and do a birthday party in the evening or do you want to just drive students every single day of the week? And there’s so many other opportunities to leverage a school bus in different ways that what we are excited about in that technology, I think we’ll be able to unlock a whole new transportation market.
So something new is coming very soon from bus ride and I feel what you are doing is absolutely right because in a lot of these ruler state or suburban cities, there is always a shortage of public transportation. So if you can repurpose some of these school buses during off peak cars or different cars in the evening or during the day for public transportation or providing connectivity, last mile connectivity and also you mentioned about cargo service, that will be great and it’ll unlock a huge market. And I think what you said when you installed those tablet, it was illegal, but now the agencies are funding those whole idea and I think what we are discussing today, probably in two year it become a norm and every school is rethinking and seeing that. So I’m looking forward, I’ll keep following what you are doing and we probably have some more discussion on that topic.
Jaspal Singh [00:44:05]:
Now the other big trend we are seeing in school bus space is electrification. There is big money available Environment Protection Agency EPA has announced $5 billion clean school bus program to replace existing school buses with zero and low emission one. This is a huge push I would say for electrification. And the big challenge will be the range for these buses and how to utilize these assets. So are you working very closely with the school districts in different region? What are their observation or what are their thought on this about the electrification and how do you see the technology will help to make this transition smoother? Because one thing I was in the morning, I was telling somebody that electrification not only just a replacement of vehicle, but a lot of other things. The charging infrastructure, the routing, the planning to making sure that the bus can complete. And in school buses, there is also thought going on about vehicle to grid. Can you give back electricity to the grid after that? So what kind of new feature you’re looking at bus ride, which will be serving only the electric bus or electric fleet.
Yeah, so first off, I’m a supporter of fleet electrification, however, due to the cost of these vehicles, which can be around $400,000 if not more, along with the limited range as you alluded to, I think we’re at least several years to a decade away from full fleet electrification in districts across the us. Now the driver shortage that we’ve talked about makes electrification even more difficult because those routes are constantly changing, routes are being merged, stops are being consolidated, broken up, and the list goes on which not only extends trip times but cuts into optimal charging windows
With the limited range on these electric vehicles, it’s critical that you know it exactly when they’re going to be back in the bus lot or near a charger. And so all of a sudden when you have this driver shortage and drivers are now on the road for longer trips are going longer, field trips go for hundreds and hundreds of miles oftentimes across state borders, you start to run into issues of well, how far does this charging infrastructure really need to extend? And do you have a fleet that is a makeup of both electric vehicles and traditional so that you can use different vehicles for different purposes? We work with districts that do that, but it kind of kills the purpose. And so all that to say I’m a supporter, I just think we are quite a ways away from that reality of full fleet electrification. Now I would also say that in order for an electric fleet to be effective, you have to understand ridership, routing the duration of these routes. You need to understand how these routes are tiered where these routes start and end their location. This is all data that bus right collects as part of our core operating system. And that is I think going to be invaluable to the success of a lot of these electrification programs in the future.
Well that’s great. And I am also in the same boat. I agree electrification is important, but at the same time it’s far away and you can’t do at the cost of providing access to students. So you can’t just say that I just want to do electrification and ignoring the other fact that like you mentioned, the driver shortage is the biggest issue and providing on-time buses or providing on-time service to the student is paramount rather than right now other stuff. And once you solve those challenges in side by side, you can have transition over the period of time. You can’t just think overnight that all the buses will be replaced. That’s great. Thanks for sharing that. And what you mentioned is very important. You have that data and if the school district is planning to go for electrification, you can share that knowledge and intelligence what range they require, how frequently the bus need to change the route, what can be their longest route and the time span and all.
So that will be critical for the school district to understand and I think that you can kind of create simulation software for them to understand how to do the transition possible. I mean great to learn about the school transportation market.
Now I want to spend some time to learn more about your entrepreneurial side. And I must say I’m very impressed I spoke to you a couple of years back, but you launched your company at the age of 18 in 2018 and in you raised series A at the age of 23. So young man, I’m so impressed. How did you manage to took thing off the ground and you are already talking about product market fit and expanding the service already at this very young age, you have gone through one of the biggest disruption of our lifetime Global pandemic. You launched company in 2018 after two year pandemic hit all the school services, buses stopped.
There was no moment and everything shut down. How did you manage to sail through that period? Because I’m pretty sure there must be a lot of thought coming in your mind whether you took a right decision or whether you should continue to spend time. And also it was very impossible to meet employees. And I know you were working with some employee remotely and I saw some of your picture when you met them first time after the pandemic restriction were uplift and you worked with them for so long, but you never met them. So very curious to know what are your entrepreneurial learning lesson at this very young age and with this pandemic and disruption.
Yeah, I think when you ask how did you sail through that period, I’ll just preface what I’m about to say with, there wasn’t a day that I wasn’t hyper paranoid about how are we going to make it through today, tomorrow, this week, this month, this year.
And frankly, we were fundraising during the peak of covid. The day that we closed our seed financing round, we hit 100 rejections, not like email passes and rejections. I’m talking about conversations. And each one of those rejections could have been one meeting or it could have been four meetings deep. So this is several hundred calls of investors telling you K-12 is going to be remote forever. School buses are literally not on the road right now. What are you doing with your love? And our market, again, was completely offline. And so we had a month and a half of runway before we ran out of cash, and our largest customer had smoking and melting tablets of hours in their vehicles.
So just to lay the foundation for the paranoia that was on display day in and day out and the incredible persistence and perseverance that every single BusRight team member had to get through that period is just an unbelievable moment of, oh my gosh. I mean I owe everything to our team for getting us through that and still seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And so against that backdrop, we decided to stay true to our vision while finding unique ways to leverage bus ride to help communities across the us. So for example, we ended up partnering with an oyster company, a donut company, cafes, et cetera, to route track and deliver over $300,000 worth of goods to several thousand homes, hospitals, community centers, because a lot of these companies that previously sold wholesale
Now have to deliver right to your doorstep. Well, that’s an incredible logistical challenge. Those drivers that you don’t have know where they’re going, how do you know who you can actually serve? How do your customers get real time visibility into where their quote packages? So I mean it was an incredible period of we turned into a full blown logistics center for many small businesses and while it was incredibly fulfilling, there wasn’t a day that went by where again, we’re looking at shrinking runway, we’re looking at tablets that are being used in some of our fleets to deliver meals.
Flyer that frankly get their meals from school, otherwise they can’t afford it. So they were using our tablets for that. So we were spread out across multiple logistics challenges and markets and sectors. But I think everything came back to no matter what, we were doing a lot of this work to harden the core product that we were building because we knew that when school buses came back online, if that was in 10 years or a year, that we would be ready with a product to meet the heightened demands and needs that would be present as a result of Covid and the challenges that we’re now experiencing. So we made another bet in that world and it was life or death for the company and it turned out to be the right decision, at least for the moment. So that was a tough period and I don’t always want to relive that, but thanks for moving me back for a second.
Yeah, I can imagine you have to quickly pivot and do something to bring some cash to keep company afloat and what you mentioned about having that persistence and perseverance to continue with your whole vision and reaching out to investor at that moment. I can imagine when they were saying everything is shut down, what are you doing? Why you are building that company? And still you need to be motivated and do that. Now the next question I want to ask you is because like you already mentioned, you got a hundred rejection when you were raising seed round. In fact, I saw the LinkedIn post when one of your early backer, he said he just gave you money over the Zoom call and he was not sure whether it’s a real company or not or what you guys are doing, but he said, I just decided to back.
But you actually started company. You mentioned in the beginning with 2,500 check from winning the Husky Startup Challenge, that kind of work as a seed money for your company and recently closed a series a round of $7 million. So you have come a long way from that journey. So many congratulations to you as well as to your team. Like you mentioned that the team play a big role. Now everybody’s talking about funding winter, but I tell people that if you have a good idea, things will work. So can you share some of your lesson while raising the and series A funding and do you have any kind of checklist for other founder who are in the same boat, like getting hundred rejection and still continue with their idea? I mean, heads off to you because it’s not easy. I know people get two three rejection and they start doubting about their whole thing, but you continue the journey. So what was your secret?
Yeah, I don’t know if I have a silver bullet for you, but you have to have conviction that the pain that you are trying to solve is so difficult for a large number of people. And if you solve it, you are eliminating a lot of pain. Now, we could talk about what that specific impact is depending on the pain you’re solving. But before and after the pandemic, it was very clear to me that these folks are underserved. They’re underappreciated, and the pain they deal with is not being served by anyone well. And so we took it upon ourself to do whatever we could as a company, whether it was take a hundred rejections or deal with smoking tablets or many other issues that we’ve run into to really make sure that we can ultimately end up serving our customers. Now, just as a recap, we raised our seed round in the peak of covid. Like I mentioned, school buses weren’t on the road. We raised our Series-A during what is cited as the most difficult time to raise money over a decade. I promise I didn’t time those things. But being the first time founder building in an overlooked market and having to raise money in these difficult times has made us really responsible capital allocators.
And as an operator, you’re going to run into many death moments and what seemed to be unlucky moments, why is this happening to me? But at 23 years old and building a company that serves customers in 23 states and working with brilliant engineers, customers, success managers, sellers, designers, serving people you deeply care about, it’s easy to see the dark side of building a business, but occasionally you have to smell the roses. And frankly, to even be in this position and to be sitting here right now in a temperature controlled environment, many people over the course of humanity have not been able to say that. So despite the unfortunate luck that we had, frankly, I consider myself lucky every day in the spirit of a checklist or resources for founders. I’m always happy to take a deep dive, go down memory lane, but I’m happy to share that if anyone wants to reach out at Keith@busright.com, if you’re not busing right, you’re busing wrong. That’s how to spell it. And it’s Keith, Keith, K-E-I-T-H.
That’s amazing. Thanks for offering that support. And I think what you said, there are a lot of these dark moments but once you’ve come out of that, you’ve come stronger. And I was recently reading a lot of Viagra graph about the founder and one of my favorite is the guy who founded the Legos company. He had nearly three or four death moments. His house burned down, the factory was burned down, he was kind of near bankruptcy and something turned up and he come out of that. And like you said, you raise seed round during height of pandemic and you raise Series-A, which is the most difficult period, today’s funding. But you come out great out of that. And I think the biggest point is being a responsible capital allocator, you work with the team in a most capital efficient way. You try to bring smartest in the team and let them freedom to expand.
And that’s something I want to discuss because recently you posted something very interesting on LinkedIn and you said this year you have closed zero in sale and you mentioned this as one of the biggest accomplishment of your career. Can you share more about this? How can zero sale is accomplishment and why do you think founders should move away from sale? At some point,
Founders should never move away from sales ever. Their role in the sales process should evolve though. When I say I was selling, I was the company’s first BDR, cold calling, knocking on doors, the company’s first account executive actually working those deals from cold call to close hundred rejections from investors pales in comparisons to several hundred if not thousands of rejections over the course of a year. But all that to say you as a founder, you need to be the one dialing, knocking on doors and figuring out what is the pain? Is there a market here? What messaging is resonating? And it seems very messy in the moment, but you come out with an appreciation for the strategy of the business and a perspective that is unparalleled if you don’t do that legwork upfront. The role of a founder, I’ll speak only from my experience is every industry and every founder has different skillsets.
But going from being a strong sales individual contributor, running my own book of business, because that was the only book of business with the company, the only way for us to scale was to bring on other people that were better at that function than me and have them run that playbook and frankly create their own revisions here and there to match their own style. So what does my role look like specifically in sales in that vein? Well now I mainly focus on speaking at conferences, getting an opportunity to speak to hundreds of transportation directors at once and really sharing our origin story, the founding story, why we exist as a business. I think we’re so much more than just a technology company. We are a product, we are a set of values, we are ears, we pride ourselves on listening acutely to anyone that we work with.
And so getting that message out there is a huge responsibility of mine now, not as much the follow-up that is required to close each individual deal, though I will get involved here and there, especially for some strategic and larger deals. But needless to say, a founder should never ever get out of the world of sales. It’s just pivot their function in sales. And I think an extension of that thesis is just constantly finding leverage. When you achieve product market fit, you as a founder have been so focused on just rapid execution, how many calls, how many demos, how much ARR am I closing, et cetera. That’s how you valued yourself to the business. All of a sudden you reach product market fit. Now your responsibility in my opinion is how do you understand the relationship between inputs and outputs
A dial to demos, conversion to close deals, et cetera. How does that bubble up to your headcount growth plan and how does that trickle down to the customer success hiring plan, the product engineer? So now it’s about inputs and outputs as opposed to constantly trying to prove so many different hypotheses at once. And so it’s about finding leverage. It’s about hiring people that are company builders. It’s no longer like everyone needs to be their own little entrepreneur, company builders, people that are experts at that part of the company building process. They productize those processes, they’re learning so that someone else can run with that playbook and then you all grow bigger and better together and can build a long lasting and enduring business.
So needless to say, I mean I’m not perfect by any stretch, but I just find that a founder, even if you are the best engineer, you’re the best salesperson, you’re the best at whatever craft it is, your impact can only go so far. It’s capped. So the best thing you can do at that point is find people who are either better than you at that or train and coach people so that they can scale that impact and that you can scale your impact accordingly and the business can grow.
Yeah, I love your point and I agree with you. Founders should never move away from sale, but it’s the purpose change and when you’re scaling up a company, it’s hard. And that’s what I spoke to a lot of founders who are in scale up and they tell me scaling up is even harder. Launching a company is hard, but scaling up is even harder because like you mentioned, you need to bring the right talent, you need to bring the right purpose and make sure the team work together to achieve that purpose. And finding people smarter than you, that’s hard because sometime founder have this impression that I’m the smartest in the room and that’s a recipe for disaster. But you need to accept that there are people who have special skill in special function and they can do better job. That’s great.
Thanks Keith for sharing. You want to add something?
Yeah, I think the benefit of being a younger first time founder is that you get to use that as an excuse to during the interview process or just talking to team members, really learn from them. They are your teacher. You only know so much as a first time young founder, this being your first real professional experience. So the more that I learn from someone, the more that I want to work with them. If I walk away from that conversation having learned more and what other people might consider being very intimidated by someone else’s expertise, that just makes me more attracted to them, right? So needless to say, I love, there are parts of the recruiting process that I really enjoy because I constantly look at it from an education perspective and how lucky that I get to speak to hundreds of people that are brilliant in their craft and use it as a learning opportunity. And the ones who teach me the most are the ones that I want to end up working with.
I love that point. The ones you teach you, the more that’s the people you really want to work with. So that’s a great point. I mean I love this lesson. It is a lesson for me and it’s learning is a two-way process. I always see even younger people can teach because you have different vision and you have a different journey.
Now this is my last question and I know you are building up, you are fully focused on BusRight. What is your vision for the bus ride in next 10 years? And also how do you see the school transport industry will shape up? Because both will go hand in hand. And the last point I would say, are you looking to expand internationally, go beyond North America and in some other market?
Yeah, school buses will be used for last mile delivery, charter transportation, public transit, transporting students most importantly. And we’re going to see a whole new transportation market built on the backs of existing infrastructure that’s laying in plain sight all across the country. Whether it’s the vehicles themselves, the real estate, they sit on, the drivers that are experts in those areas geographically and experts at driving districts that want more money. That’s where our previous conversation, a school bus and the people behind it I think can do so much more than they’re currently doing right now. And we want to make them the heroes that they are in their community. And I’ll keep saying it over and over again.
And what’s your plan to go beyond North America?
What’s our plan? I think there’s a huge opportunity in North America. I haven’t spent enough time abroad to deeply understand those challenges and figure out the similarities and difficulties. But if pain exists out there and we can solve it, I’m not going to say no to helping people.
I love that point. It’s not just going international for any reason, but if the pain exists, you would love to solve it. I love that point now, thank you so much Keith.
We had a great conversation so far and we generally end this podcast with, have some kind of a rapid fire round and the purpose of this rapid fire to know a little bit more personal side of you as a person, what you like. So if you’re ready, I would kickstart that.
Yeah, happy to.
So I know you were very focused on building this company and school transportation, but let’s say if you’re not in this school transportation space or industry, what other profession you would’ve selected?
Wow, really not ready for this question or I’m sure the ones to follow, but if I wasn’t in this profession, I would say that the world of hospitality generally excites me. I used to growing up work at hotels, resorts, I was a reservation agent in the summers and work front desk at different hotels and what not. And the concept of being able to, the quick gratification that you get when someone comes to the front desk and either says, we need a room tonight because we need somewhere to stay and here’s why. Or the towel wasn’t folded correctly on my bed, you should be fired. I’m half exaggerating there, but being able to solve people’s problems and change their mood and their day right on the spot and feel like you actually have quite a bit of control over that is a game that I love playing and is a game that I think has tremendous impact.
So all that to say, I think hospitality is, there’s not a ton of innovation there. I think the level of personalization that the SaaS world and the technology world more broadly applies to deeply understanding their customers, knowing what they love to eat for breakfast, sending them flowers because it’s their anniversary, whatever it is. I think that can apply to so many other industries, especially hospitality, to make people feel really and at home. And I think being an entrepreneur, you have to make people feel welcome and at home and safe in their job as a customer, as an investor, their money is safe with you or the hospitality, I think you have a quicker gratification loops, maybe the impact is slightly different, but that’s something that does excite me. So whether it’s running a boutique hotel chain or b and b, a brand or building large scale apartment complexes that focus on community and whatnot, I don’t know, it excites me.
I love that point. I was recently reading this book called Setting the Table and this guy is like a guru in hospitality and his whole point is how to make customer feel special. And I can resonate with your point when you say have those small win, change the mood of customer and doing that.
Now my second question is, I don’t know if you traveled so much around the world or you’ve seen so much outside North America, but if you have, which is your favorite city in the world?
Probably the most unique I’ve been to across many categories. Jerusalem, I’m at bar mitzvah there many, many years ago and it definitely helped when a bunch of my family members were there. It was very special moment. But I would say that was unique. I definitely want to go back at some point. Unfortunately I’m terrified of flying, so I got to figure that out first. But yeah, I would say that’s probably at the top of the list. And I’ve been to a number of cities across the US and I mean I grew up outside of New York and I don’t think there’s another city that offers as much as New York in all the categories that everyone already knows about. But there are some up and coming cities that I’m excited about. I did recently enjoy time in Savannah, which surprised me and Boise, Idaho and some of the beautiful mountains and scenery and landscape they have there is breathtaking and I don’t think people give it enough credit, but yeah, there’s a number of others. That’s my answer though.
Yeah, I love your point about Jerusalem because I’ve been there. I love the city, the culture, the history, so I love history. So when you see so much of history at one place, it kind of make you quite excited. And I would say nobody has mentioned that city ever in my last podcast episode. So that’s something very unique because everybody mentioned some city which are already known, but Jerusalem I love, I love your answer, which is your favorite book?
Oh, that’s an easy one. Super pumped. The founding story of Uber. Now I know a controversial company for many reasons, but what you can’t dispute is the tenacity that that company had, the uphill battles that they had to conquer takes a very unique culture and leader and community around it to get through. We’ve been fortunate enough, one of their earliest investors that back then when they were a black car company as one of our first investors and just to hear and learn about their origin story and what they had to go through, it gives you confidence as an operator that when you think that there’s a near death moment coming up, you you’d be surprised at what we as humans are capable of conquering. And they’re a great example of that.
Amazing. In fact, I’ve worked with Uber for one year, so I know inside that hustle was required at that age because if they didn’t hustle, Uber would never be a $80 billion company what it exists today. So there was a lot of backstory. You have now five year entrepreneurial journey, you’re quite young, but at the same time, what one thing do you wish you should have learned early in life? I mean this is question for people who are quite old, but at the same time you already seen so many things. So what is the one thing you think, okay, I should have learned early in life?
Yeah, that’s tricky. I think something I continue to remind myself that I’m still trying to learn and reinforce, I always come back to this quote that the reward for solving problems is more problems.
This notion that, oh, when we raise this round of funding, we’re a major success. Or when we close this big customer, that’s a huge success or we hire this team member and the list goes on. And I don’t think what people don’t focus on enough is that in achieving those milestones, the challenges that you now have to face significantly outweigh any amount of success that you thought was going to be there. And the original definition of success, so the way that I look at it is when you raise more money and you bring on that new team member and you’re growing, you’re just giving yourself an opportunity to be hit in the face with challenges you never even knew could exist on this planet. And it always amazes me how in every corner of the business there’s something that challenges the status quo that pops up that in your heart of hearts you didn’t even realize could be an issue or could even happen from team dynamics to product issues to when we a physical, we have hardware out there in the world and things you never even thought about when you were in Native American reservations with no street legal addresses, the list goes on.
And so you just give yourself an opportunity to solve more problems. And if you don’t get sometimes excited about that, then you’re in it for the wrong reason.
Yeah, that’s a beautiful point. Reward for solving problems, having more problem. And that’s very true. The moment you cross one journey there is more other journey, common power.
Now this is my last question and it’s like if you have some magical power and if you can change one thing in life, what would it be?
Yeah, I don’t think this is the first thing that comes to mind right now. I mean, I could give you the answer that I’m sure a lot of people want like ending world hunger and the list goes on. One thing that I think is underrated is the way that we as individuals feel is just on a spectrum of our own life experiences. And so the pain that I feel right now is only relative to the most and the least amount of pain that I’ve ever felt. And yes, I can really try to empathize with people that have dealt with significantly worse, but I do wish there was a sense of deeper empathy that could come if humans could adopt the range of pain and happiness that has occurred across many generations and centuries to really appreciate how far we’ve come as a species. And when you’re in four walls in temperature controlled environment and you have food every day, that should be a huge success. And we’re always constantly racing to the next by and large, because our range has changed to match where we’ve evolved as a species,
Man, are you seriously 23? Because what you’re saying, I don’t think people understand even at the age of 60. So the deeper empathy mean. In fact, today morning I was reading news about Libya, there was a flood 2000 people killed in that there was an earthquake in Morocco, 3000 people killed in that. And I had that sense of gratitude in the morning is like, man, I’m lucky I’m still alive. Those people, they just lost their life with just a nick of a moment and they didn’t even realize like earthquake happened, 3000 people kill, flood happened, 2000 people kill. And everyday morning when we wake up, we should feel that man, we are lucky, we are still alive, we have a roof on our head and we are eating our food. So what you said at that deeper empathy, I think that’s superb. That point is I love that. And if people have that deeper empathy, the world problem will be solved.
And I would add to that as it relates to being a founder, you often think about the challenges you have to solve at any point in the future and it can be overwhelming and your range because of the pain that you’re able to take and the issues that you deal with because you’re constantly building this callous in your mind. David Goggins, I recently read about one of his books he talks about, it’s about callousing your mind as you grow old. It’s not about just experiencing things that make you more soft and make your skin even thinner than it already is, especially in this day and age. But callous, you can’t underestimate the things that you can conquer as you slowly build more and more callous in your brain. Think about when you go to the gym and you’re lifting weights for the first time. You’re ripped through that skin and it really hurts, but the next time that you go back and you have a little bit, there’s a little bit of a callous there. You keep going, you keep going. But the amount of weight and the amount of pain that you’re able to take because it’s not going to cut through that wound anymore
You already have such a strong foundation. So same goes with being a founder. The things that you can stomach just grow tremendously and no one is born, I believe, with the stomach to tackle what Kalanick at Uber did. He built that callous through getting knocked in the face many times over.
Yeah, well that’s so true. That’s so true. I’ve seen that journey. I never get a chance to meet him in person, but I was on some of the call and I heard about him a lot from the senior executive. He did something great and sometime it is like you don’t get the full credit. And I feel sad because he built something, not just a company, but the full category of on demand. So he opened up opportunity for many more people. Thank you so much, Keith. I mean, I really love this conversation, great insight. I don’t know what is your learning, but I learned a lot from this conversation. Like you said, I would say I met something, somebody who’s smarter than me and wish you good luck in your journey and keep me posted how you’re working with public transportation and school bus. That’s the area I love.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
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Introduction:
School Bus Transportation is the largest transit system in North America. In the US alone, there are 50 million K-12 students in public schools and there are 5.8 million in private schools. So it’s in total it’s like 57 million students or kids who need to be transported every day. However, School Bus transportation is facing many challenges including a shortage of bus drivers, funding constraints, and increasing complexity. Technology will play an important role in improving the school bus operation and managing resources optimally.
Keith Corso is the Co-founder & CEO of BusRight. He ideated the company in high school and built the foundation for BusRight during his time at Northeastern University in Boston, alongside several other team members. BusRight is a transportation technology startup, reshaping the student transportation industry with its routing software, real-time GPS, dynamic driver navigation, and a bus tracking app for parents. He has held roles on both sides of the venture ecosystem, from serving as the President of the Entrepreneurs Club in college, to working as an Analyst for MassMutual Ventures, a Venture Fellow for Underscore VC, and Venture Director for Origin – a deep tech hub