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- [00:01]
Keith Corso
You mean when you have less than a month of cash in the bank, a term sheet gets pulled from you? The day that you finally close your seed financing round, you hit 100 rejections in your CRM.
- [00:14]
Brett
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump in today's episode. Today we're speaking with Keith Corso, co founder and CEO of Bus Rite. Keith, welcome to the show.
- [00:52]
Keith Corso
Thanks so much, Brett. I know we had connected in 2022, so it's good to finally, you know, put a face to it and make this happen.
- [00:59]
Brett
A lot of spam to get you here, but I'm happy that you're here. Did you grow up just thinking about school buses or where did this all come together?
- [01:06]
Keith Corso
I grew up. My best friend was my bus driver, Joy. She's the reason why there was a poem on the floor of my childhood closet when I was cleaning it out during COVID that I found and read proudly. And she is the inspiration for what is now bus. Right, but that's a whole much longer story. So.
- [01:24]
Brett
And what does Bus Rite do? If people ask you if you're on a flight and someone sits down next to you, they're chatty. They say, what do you do? How do you answer that question?
- [01:30]
Keith Corso
I would say that the people that are running air traffic control, they use systems technology. We basically are the digital infrastructure that orchestrates the largest mass transit network, which are school buses. Much like air traffic control through various tools, orchestrate air travel.
- [01:48]
Brett
One thing I like to do is just nerd out on different industries. And I found that the second you start to dig into an industry, there's all these fascinating things that you uncover and you find for you. If you look at this industry, what are some of those fascinating things that you found that may be surprising to someone like me, who's probably never thought about a school bus before?
- [02:04]
Keith Corso
I'll give you several. Number one, there's half a million school bus drivers. Most of them are still routing with paper route sheets and physical maps. With scribbled notes on them that say, brett's house has a yellow mailbox. In a world right now where the average school bus fleet has 10 to 15% fewer drivers than they need, you can no longer rely on these outdated, inefficient paper route sheets that are static. So that's number one. Number two, when we started Bus Ride, it was illegal to put tablets on school buses. So this idea around dynamic navigation, digital turn by turn directions that can guide the driver like we're all used to in the consumer economy with Google Maps in Waze, that doesn't exist, by and large, even today, and we're trying to change that. Number three, school buses, like I said, are the largest mass transit network. If you add up all the planes, trains, public transit buses, and all other forms of mass transportation vehicles, there are still way more school buses every day. Given that there's 50 million students that go to a public education every day in the United States alone, and those are a few that I will leave you with.
- [03:17]
Brett
Why are tablets illegal? I'm sure there's an obvious reason, but,
- [03:21]
Keith Corso
like, why you did not want drivers looking at their phones and their smartphones. Primarily because there was nothing useful for them for the job. Up until I would say Bus Right was founded, legislators need an excuse to say, wait, no. Now there's a purpose and a way for our drivers to be more effective at their job. And I would like to say that we were a small part of, you know, bringing that to light and helping, you know, turn the narrative around.
- [03:49]
Brett
Now, did you find out that it was illegal after you founded the company or at what stage in the founding journey did you learn that it was going to be illegal, what you were trying to do?
- [03:57]
Keith Corso
Yeah, we had tablets on buses, primarily across a number of states. I'll say one of our first states happened to be Massachusetts. And yes, we could have either taken them all off, or we could have listened to our drivers that were saying how much safer their jobs were and how much better they felt about their roles. And with that sidekick, that tablet right there on the dashboard of that bus, ultimately, what helps students will ultimately show up in legislation. And sure enough, it did.
- [04:25]
Brett
And how is that regulated? Is that at the federal level? Is it state by state?
- [04:29]
Keith Corso
It's largely state by state, though there is general guidance at the federal level that, hey, you are able to have onboard GPS devices, but then the states are able to create more nuanced legislation around. Can you have turn by turn navigation live, or can it just speak to. But it's Exciting now, you know, years later, pretty much every state in the country allows this and even encourages it through reimbursements. States like New York, I'm in right now, Idaho, and others, they will actually reimburse school districts because they realize that in order to solve the problems that the industry is facing today, you need to make school buses safer and much more efficient. And it partly starts by combining a driver and their skills with a tablet and the information they can get in real time.
- [05:15]
Brett
I think oftentimes when you look at disruptive technologies like this, the status quo, there'll be a group of people or companies, I should say, that, you know, stand to lose if the status quo changes for you. Did that exist here? Like, was there anyone that was vocal against this besides maybe, like, parents and maybe, like a safety issue? Like, was there any group that financially benefits from having dumb buses? I don't know if that's a fair way to frame that, but not using smart technology is what I'm trying to say.
- [05:41]
Keith Corso
It's mostly a win, win, win. I wouldn't say everyone is thrilled. I would say that especially when this was first introduced, there were questions around, how do we justify this from a budgetary perspective? But most of our customers, they pay for a bus ride every year through the savings that our platform drives. But I'll be honest, it did take time for that to show up in the numbers and the case studies and so on. But it's exciting to see that come
- [06:06]
Brett
to life here and for the laws that have been changed. Did you hire lobbyists? How involved were you in the changing of those laws or updating those laws?
- [06:14]
Keith Corso
Yeah, we have pretty close connections with a lot of the state directors of student transportation across the country, and I will say that we helped connect them to the outcomes that we were seeing on the ground as, you know, a pioneer of bringing this to the market. And it's pretty clear when you talk to a driver who's been doing this for 30, 40 years, when they're able to say, you know what? I have never been able to do my job as effectively as I can now, or a driver, that English isn't their first language, and now they're comfortable taking on more routes, field trips, after school, runs, etc. Because all they do is click a button, start navigation, and they could focus on what they do best, the road ahead of them, and building relationships with those students behind them.
- [06:56]
Brett
This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. So we talked about one crisis. Finding out what you're doing is illegal. Let's talk about another one, which would be Covid. I'm sure that was that dark time for you. Take us back to March. What was that? 2020.
- [07:30]
Keith Corso
Yeah, it's such a small talk buzz question to say, where were you when Covid hit? But I think it's especially salient for folks who are trying to found or grow a company during that time. And specifically In March of 2020, we were heads down launching Bus Rite, especially across several key markets. And the largest parent app launch that we had, the day before that launch, Boston effectively shut down, which is where I was based at the time. Overnight, schools, not just in Boston, but across the country, went dark. And what was the largest mass transit network in the country was now completely dormant. The entire market went to zero. So what do you do when the product you've built, the vision that you have, and the customers that you're excited and exist to serve evaporate overnight? When you actually wake up, Brett, that next morning, like, what are you doing? How do you motivate a team around a vision that doesn't exist in this new reality? And so we had two choices. We could pivot our product and our business model entirely, or we could go deeper on our conviction around the importance of public education and that in person learning experience. And we certainly chose the latter. I had high conviction that students would always need school, that the world would come back, and. And we decided we wanted to keep building for that eventual reality. We pivoted temporarily to, you know, partner with donut shops and oyster companies and others to deliver direct to consumer because they had pretty intense logistical challenges. They could no longer sell to the restaurant. They had to deliver thousands of product to thousands of homes. And so within 24 hours of the world shutting down, I was on the phone with local businesses that had been those wholesale providers to restaurants, and we had turned them into basically their own last mile delivery fleets. And so, yeah, throughout that whole time, you have to ask yourself, why are you still in this? And we were not only helping these small businesses, but we were also hardening the core of our product and Our vision that we knew that would come back to life soon enough and would need us more than ever. Because the problems that we exist to solve would only be exacerbated a severe driver shortage, overwhelming parent demands and surging route complexity.
- [09:48]
Brett
Going back to those days, does any like low point come to mind? Like do you recall just like a really, really painful period during the COVID era?
- [09:55]
Keith Corso
You mean when you have less than a month of cash in the bank, a term sheet gets pulled from you? The day that you finally close your seed financing round, you hit 100 rejections in your CRM and 100 rejections are live meetings. Five meetings including the partner meeting is one rejection. So you're at close to 400 plus meetings from one financing round. Yeah, that's certainly a low point. I remember going downstairs and I was at my parents place, it was this Friday and I just started crying. I don't want to relive that.
- [10:26]
Brett
Fair enough. And we won't make you relive that on the, on the podcast.
- [10:30]
Keith Corso
Thank you.
- [10:31]
Brett
For you. Are you a transportation company? Are you an ed tech company? Are you a logistics company? Like how do you identify we are
- [10:38]
Keith Corso
a logistics company that powers public education.
- [10:43]
Brett
And what's the competitive set look like for you? It sounds like the biggest competitor is literally just the status quo of pen and paper. Is there another competitor that's trying to solve it in different ways but trying to apply technology to solve this problem?
- [10:57]
Keith Corso
Yeah. So about half of our customers partner with us, coming from pen and paper or Google sheets for routing, dispatch, driver credentialing and so on and so forth. The other half will come to us from typically a couple of companies that have been around for I'd say 30, 40 plus decades where their primary product is a routing software. But you know, what we realized is that to solve the problems today around driver shortages, parent expectations, around student safety routes becoming increasingly more complex, you need this all in one platform that's super intuitive, that connects the driver with the parent, with the transportation leaders. And so you know, we're basically trying to convince transportation leaders that there is a way to solve these problems that's different than what you've done in the past.
- [11:45]
Brett
And what do those conversations look like today? Like when you're having a conversation, where do you see the Aha.
- [11:50]
Keith Corso
Brett, if you're a transportation director and you run a 50 bus fleet, you show up at work at 4:15 in the morning and 10% of your drivers are not going to show up today. You don't know which 10% those are. What that means is a lot of things. But it also means that you, Brett, are going to be jumping into a school bus in a couple hours, staring at a paper route sheet that you don't know if it's real or not, if it's active or not, if the information is correct or not. And you say to yourself, wait, this tablet that this company is showing me that I could pull up any route that I want. It tells me what parents or guardians should be at every stop. It gives me medical information about students that are on the bus. It only routes me to the right homes based on things like split custody and student schedules. All of a sudden the transportation director has this aha moment for themself that they can do a better job as they have to fill in to support while they're short.
- [12:46]
Brett
So many drivers in San Francisco. Yeah, I went through. This is like a year ago. What I just kind of noted personally as like an interesting moment in life where I switched from my default travel being Uber to default being Waymo with driverless cars. Like for you, how do you think about the impact of driverless, you know, coming in? And I'm sure that I would hope that, yeah, that buses are probably coming way later for that, but it seems like it would be inevitable that eventually driverless technology would come.
- [13:13]
Keith Corso
The core role of a school bus driver, in my opinion, is building relationships with students on that bus and making sure the ride is safe. I think in a world where there are driver assisted tools, you will still need a driver, call them a coach, call them a teacher, whatever you want to be on that vehicle. Because students sometimes spend two, three plus hours on that bus, which could be about half of the school day. And it will be critical to have that presence on that bus. It's also underrated the complexity that exists in student transportation. For example, we download information every night around every child, who their parents and guardians are, the emergency contact, their IEP information. Do they have special education requirements that necessitate a wheelchair accessible vehicle or a bus aid on that bus? Do they have split custody arrangements? Multiple homes are going to. Do they go to the YMCA every other Friday? Are they going to grandma's house? I say all of this because it's really hard to automate a lot of this away. And there is a part of the human touch and the human presence around young students and children that is needed, especially in, you know, the face, the start and the end to that school day to make sure kids have great educational outcomes. And there's also a lot of Nuances around where buses can actually go. There's a reason why bus drivers don't use Google Maps or Waze or off the shelf navigation products. They send them down roads that have weight limits, overpasses too narrow, and so on. So you need to have a lot of context about where a school bus can go and you need to have all the other information about every student's individual requirements to be able to do this successfully. The waymo that you get into, it's really impressive what it can do, but it's transporting one rider or two. And that's a complex routing engine for a school bus. We have the 50, 60, 70 riders, parents and guardians for every one of those parents and guardians that could only view the route on certain days and students that have all these different requirements on all different days all throughout the year. So we are a long ways away from, I think, the world that you are implying. And I do believe that there's still a presence for the human on that bus.
- [15:33]
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- [15:53]
Brett
well, it sounds like the driving part is almost the least important part of that experience. Right. Of all the other things that they would do, and I would imagine when that technology does come, whether that's in 10 years, 20 years, or 30 years, like that would just free that person up to be able to spend more time doing that type of stuff that that human only can do.
- [16:10]
Keith Corso
Yeah, in a way, the tablet on that bus frees them up too, because now that they are able to see the face of the student as the kid gets on the bus that pops up on the tablet, what does that enable them to do? Have a more personalized conversation with that child, make them feel more important. So there's ways that technology is already leaning into the strengths of that driver and of that adult in the room on that bus.
- [16:34]
Brett
And so, yeah, I know the journey for enterprise sales is very slow, takes, you know, many months, sometimes years. What's that like selling to school systems?
- [16:44]
Keith Corso
Selling to transportation is quite different from selling to a school district, despite them generally being one of the same. A transportation director exists, just like a curriculum director, an IT director, and so on. But transportation is often shoved in the basement of the school or often to a separate site in their own office or a trailer as their office or what have you. And a lot of folks that grow up that work in school administration have a education or curriculum background. It's not logistics and transportation that gives the transportation director a lot more autonomy over their decisions and over their budget. So we sell to customers every month throughout the year. There's not really much to seasonality as far as sales cycles are concerned for us. It's not to say that we don't need additional stakeholder buy in like a traditional enterprise sale, but it is to say that selling to a transportation director is quite different than any other sale to a school district.
- [17:40]
Brett
Interesting. Yeah. I had on the founder of paper a while back an edtech unicorn out of Canada. And he was saying that him selling into school districts, it was completely public. You know, all of the numbers, everything was public. It was a brutal process. So you're, you're able to bypass all of that effectively.
- [17:55]
Keith Corso
I don't know their exact sales motion, so I can't say we bypass everything that they navigate. But I will say that when you have parents that are saying that the superintendent should be fired on Facebook pages because their kid doesn't have a ride to school, or you have a transportation director that shows up at their office after a morning route that says the driver on this route did a horrible job and that was actually them, and you have rising costs across transportation. There is certainly an urgency to solve these problems right now for you.
- [18:26]
Brett
At what stage did you start to transition out of founder led sales?
- [18:30]
Keith Corso
We're about a million of ARR. A little more than that. And that's when I really started to build out, you know, our first couple account executives. And then that led to our first couple BDRs. That led to then our next, call it 10 account executives and 8 to 10 BDRs and then VP of sales and sales manager and so on. But yeah, I'd say about the 1,000,000 ARR mark.
- [18:50]
Brett
And how big is the sales team today?
- [18:52]
Keith Corso
Like 25 folks.
- [18:53]
Brett
What were the big learnings as you made that transition in terms of pain? How painful was it? And I know your range. You've had a lot of pain. So how painful was it?
- [19:02]
Keith Corso
Yeah, well, the first attempt at transitioning to an account executive was unfortunately unsuccessful. So that was extremely painful. However, I learned that there's many ways to be right. The next account executive we hired had a completely different style than me. And it's easy to want to hire exactly who you are because who you know what works based on your own style. And I had known this individual to be successful in a similar space. And I wanted to be proven wrong, that there's actually many ways to be right. And yeah, one of the hardest things was, you know, it takes time to see the fruits of your labor when you're selling into this space. And I really just had to have high conviction in the individual and that they were going to figure it out and they were going to take the best of what what I did and make it their own, too.
- [19:49]
Brett
When you think ahead, what are the big bets you're making in terms of growth?
- [19:53]
Keith Corso
Transportation directors don't want software. They want outcomes. That's it.
- [19:57]
Brett
That's the bet. And final question, where should people go if they want to follow along with you?
- [20:02]
Keith Corso
You can follow me on LinkedIn @KeithCorso and I would say that's probably the best place for now.
- [20:07]
Brett
Amazing. Keith, thanks so much. Been a lot of fun.
- [20:09]
Keith Corso
Thanks so much, Brett. I appreciate it.
- [20:13]
Brett
Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO, where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO Podcasts as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show. Then we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you in the next episode.