Zūm Founder and CEO Ritu Narayan

Ritu Narayan is the Founder and CEO of Zūm, a company modernizing and electrifying student transportation. In this conversation, Ritu walks through the path that led her to Zūm: from growing up in India as the oldest of four children, to studying computer engineering as one of six women in a class of 300 at Delhi Institute of Technology, to building products at Oracle, Yahoo, and eBay. It was at eBay, watching colleagues leave early to pick up their kids while her own arrangements kept falling through, that she had the insight that would become Zūm. She left eBay to attend the Stanford Graduate School of Business where she incubated a direct-to-parent rideshare for working families, which later became a full-service school district platform modernizing and electrifying the yellow school bus. She also speaks about her passion for the problem, what it meant to build this company for herself, her mother, all working parents, and why she believes being an underdog is not a disadvantage, but a super power.