Our Climate Journey with Chris Tobin
“Climate change is the issue of our time. We have to tackle it at a certain level to make a dent. Swapping out tens of thousands of diesel buses for EVs—that makes a dent. That’s one of the main reasons I joined Zum, to be part of a company making a bigger dent.”
Chris Tobin
Chief People Officer
Chris is a seasoned Chief People Officer and startup advisor with over 24 years of experience. For 14 of those, he led the People function for high growth startups. Before Zum, Chris held the top People/HR executive role at the SaaS company Intercom, the fintech company Affirm, the digital magazine Flipboard, and the digital media company Say Media. Prior to Say Media, Chris held senior human resources and organization development roles at eBay and Sun Microsystems.
Chris grew up in Mill Valley, close to Muir Woods, but has lived in San Francisco since 1998. He lives with his wife and their two teenage children. Chris and his family love to travel, spend time outdoors and listen to live music wherever possible.
At Zum, we’re revolutionizing student transportation in order to build a green, sustainable future. What does sustainability mean to you?
For me, sustainability is acknowledging the damage we’ve already done to the planet while building the path forward to healing it. If we don’t acknowledge and understand the mistakes we’ve made we can’t develop solutions that will reverse our current and quite bleak trajectory.
This is particularly relevant to me because I have children. We’re only one, maybe two, generations away from irreparable damage to the planet, and I want my kids’ kids to live on a planet that supports and nourishes them.
Something else I hear very often is that every bit counts when it comes to sustainability. That’s true and absolutely something we need to reinforce. Individuals can definitely make a difference, and if we really want to see change at scale, we need to mobilize both the public and private sector. We need governments to take more action, and we need more companies like Zum.
Climate change is the issue of our time. We have to tackle it at a certain level to make a dent. Swapping out tens of thousands of diesel buses for EVs—that makes a dent. That’s one of the main reasons I joined Zum, to be part of a company making a bigger dent.
Climate change is the single greatest threat to our way of life, but it can sometimes feel abstract, far away, a problem for another time. How has climate change affected you personally?
I grew up in San Francisco, but my mom and her family, they’re from Hawaii. I’ve gone back so many times over my life, and now so have my wife and kids.
When you go back to a place consistently, but with long spaces in between, the changes are really stark. It’s like if you could only see pictures of a person once every few years: the differences would be really obvious.
In Hawaii, it’s very obvious. Rising sea levels and temperatures are completely altering the landscape. My family lives on the east side of Oahu, which is more local and community oriented. It’s in places like this where you immediately see the effects of climate change. It has contributed significantly to the erosion of the beaches, almost to the point where some parts of the coast are unrecognizable. In addition, the fishery has been dramatically altered by rising temperatures. Fish populations have plummeted, which for locals upends both culture and access to a viable and healthy food source. Even small things like getting clean drinking water—which you often have to import, on an island like Hawaii—are now much more fraught.
Perhaps most troubling is the cultural effect that this has on the people. Fishing is such an enormous part of people’s lives: it’s their diet, their livelihood, their culture. When I was younger, you could simply walk some of the beaches, catch a fish, and go home. You can’t do that any more. Yes, some of that’s overfishing—another problem we’ve created—but it’s also the impact of rising sea levels and temperatures on the ecosystem.
My oldest child just turned 18. He hasn’t seen as stark a change as I have, but he absolutely can tell the difference between what he saw when he was younger and what he sees now. As a parent, this makes things feel very real to me, and very sad.
What can Zum do to be a leader in sustainability, to spearhead the charge in the fight against climate change?
In the vein of acknowledging the harm we’ve already done to the planet, transportation is a material contributor to our current climate predicament. Depending on the way you slice it—passenger transportation vs commercial, ground vs sea and air—it’s the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the U.S. Yet it’s also traditionally been one of the slowest moving sectors.
Thankfully, that’s changing rapidly. We have companies working on decarbonizing every element of the sector, which is extremely encouraging. Student transportation, as the largest mass transit system in the country, is of course a prime target for this, and I’m proud to work for a company that’s dealing with this issue. Like I said, we need to operate at scale in order to have an impact, and at Zum, we’re combining a mission (making student transportation safer, more efficient, and greener for everyone) with the scale and financial viability to actually make that change.
From my view, we just need to keep applying force at scale, and that’s how we’ll really make a difference.