A Visit from the White House!

Yesterday, I was honored to host Heather Boushey , Chief Economist for the Invest in America Cabinet, at Zum’s bus yard in San Francisco. This was a momentous occasion for our employees, our company, and for me personally.?

I’m so proud of the work that our hard-working team members have done to get us to this place. I founded this company in 2015 to create safer, healthier, and more reliable transportation for school children—starting with my own, who I was struggling to get safely to and from school while balancing a full-time career. Today, we’re serving school districts all across the country, our buses have driven millions of miles, and we’re spearheading a movement toward cleaner, more equitable student transportation. Our district partners, like San Francisco Unified School District and Oakland Unified School District , have saved millions of dollars by teaming up with us, our students are spending significantly less time in transit, and we’re actively electrifying our entire bus fleet, setting a standard for decarbonized transportation that we hope, and believe, all transportation providers will follow. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have foreseen that we’d end up here.?

I’d also like to extend a sincere and heartfelt thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration. From its inception—between the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and now the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Bus Program—the White House has signaled its strong and consistent support for climate policy. Heather herself is responsible for driving the funding behind such initiatives, and I was so gratified to welcome her to our yard and be in conversation with her.?

At a roundtable with a number of highly important figures, three critical points emerged:

1. Zum is driving forward change throughout the electrified transportation ecosystem, linking users (like students and parents and school districts) with manufacturers (like BYD and Lion) and utilities (like PG&E). Only by connecting every point in the entire can we truly make an impact and build a greener future;
2. Zum is also driving change by bringing together both AI technology and electrification onto the same platform, a unique combination that’s allowing us to both prove the financial case for electric bus fleets and lower carbon emissions;
3. And finally, the narrative surrounding the electrification of transportation is critical, and needs to be shared widely so that others know what’s happening at the forefront of our newly decarbonized economy, and have a standard to follow. This, in part, is why such meetings are so important—to let the industry and world know that we are serious about building a more sustainable, healthier, more equitable future.?

I am an immigrant to this country. Coming from overseas, the White House is something I heard about in stories, and saw in films. The idea that a business I started would receive a visit from the highest seat of power in the nation is truly astounding, and is a testament both to how hard our team has worked, and to how important a clean-powered future is to the United States, and to the world.?

Thank you to the Biden-Harris Administration, thank you to my children for inspiring me to start Zum, and thank you to everyone at Zum—our employees, students, families, parents, school administrators, and drivers—for bringing this vision to fruition. We’ve come a long way and we still have a long road ahead of us.