Driving America Forward with Kevin Hyen
“By combining electric fleets, smart software, and operational discipline, Zum is showing that large scale, clean, and reliable mobility is actually achievable today, not some future idea.”
Kevin Hyen
Director of Revenue Accounting Operations
Zum
Kevin Hyen is Director of Revenue Accounting Operations at Zum. He began his career as a public accountant, auditing large companies, before making the switch to tech. After working at several startups, including Zendesk, he made the jump to Zum, where he works with school districts across the company to provide clear and transparent pricing.
I started off as public accountant, auditing big companies and making sure their numbers were right, then to startups, Zendesk, went public, good journey to witness that, then ad company doing the same thing, worked in tech my whole life (saas), Zum was a new challenge, I’m used to selling widgets, this is different, it’s kids going to school.
In your role at Zum, how do you think about innovation?
To me, innovation is all about radical transparency and efficiency.
The end product at Zum is pretty easy to understand: we get kids safely to and from school. The cool thing about my job is, I get to see the plumbing behind that.
A big part of the job is providing clear and transparent pricing to our customers. I take the data we have at our disposal—the number of trips, the stops, the kids on each bus, all of it—and pair that with our pricing, so I can explain to our customers how and why we charge what we charge. The school districts use that data to figure out what they’re paying per student, per trip, per school, and they also use it to figure out how much money they need to allocate in the future for their student transportation contract.
In this way, my team is able to connect the dots between what the school district is getting, and what they pay for it. This makes it so much easier for them to manage budgets, and empowers the school district to focus on what really matters: the students.
From your perspective, at a company-wide level, how is Zum driving American innovation forward?
I said that innovation is all about data and transparency, and the same thing applies to Zum at the company level.
The data I use in my job is the same data that goes to the school districts, the bus drivers, and the parents of the students on each bus. Without that data, Zum wouldn’t be able to provide the level of detail and safety that we do—and that’s the real innovation here.
School bus companies have always gotten students to and from school, but at Zum, because of our technology, we’re able to do it more safely and efficiently—and we’re able to show every bit of our data to our school district partners. That’s a huge part of our innovation.
When you think of the future, what role do children/the next generation play, and how can we set them up for success?
I think the biggest thing we can do is educate the next generation, and make sure that, like Zum, they’re always willing to challenge the status quo.
The reason Zum is so innovative is that we didn’t assume that just because things are done one way, they should always be done that way. I want us to challenge the next generation to think the same way. I’d love these children riding on our buses to look at the world and ask, “How can we do this better?”
By providing them with a safer, more efficient, tech-forward experience on our buses, we are modeling the kind of forward-thinking world we want them to build in the future.