Our Climate Journey with Sanju Varma
“To me, sustainability is all about transition.”
Sanju Varma
Sanju joined Zum in 2024 as Principal Product Designer, creating digital experiences for the company’s yard and school operations teams, drivers and parents.
Sanju grew up in Mumbai, India, studied computer engineering, and moved to the U.S. two decades ago to pursue a Masters degree in computer science, human computer interaction, and animation. His passion is mixing form and function to solve problems in the digital world. He lives in Campbell with his wife and two boys, loves to grill, ski, swim and go to music concerts. In his free time, he tinkers with his smart home automation, perfects his home theater equipment, and drives his performance car around town.
At Zum, we’re revolutionizing student transportation in order to build a green, sustainable future. What does sustainability mean to you?
To me, sustainability is all about transition.
Before joining Zum six months ago, I spent four years at Tesla, where I was a product designer for their fleet management team. I worked on the part of Tesla’s business that called on rental car companies like Hertz and Avis that were converting their traditional vehicle fleets to EVs. There, I saw firsthand the importance of changing the way we move and transport ourselves around.
At the same time, my wife was incubating an idea for a startup. Today, she’s actively raising money for a company that will help change our mindsets about using stainless steel instead of single-use plastics items—using things that are washable, reusable, and with a much longer useful life.
Today, we often seek the cheapest, fastest solutions to our problems, but that isn’t what’s best for our planet. We need to shift away from acting like our resources are infinite to behaving like they’re finite—which they are.
At Tesla, at Zum, and with my wife’s company, we’re shifting the way we consume and produce in order to respect natural resources and keep things going in perpetuity—the definition of “sustainability.” I’m proud to have been part of companies that are driving that shift.
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?
My family and I moved from New York to California in 2012. At that time, we faced the true heat of climate change.
In California, for the first time, I saw signs that said, “Do not water your lawn.” On road trips, my wife and I wondered how the green California we’d seen in movies had turned into today’s brown and dry hills. And in the decade we’ve lived here, we’ve seen the gradual shift to extreme temperatures—hotter summer days, aggressive wildfires, and microclimates within a 10 mile radius.
Several years ago, I remember waking up to orange skies from the wildfires in Northern California; it was strange and scary, and felt like we were on Mars. That day more than any made me realize the harsh truth of climate change, and that we need to do something about it.
What can Zum do to be a leader in sustainability, to spearhead the charge in the fight against climate change?
About ten years ago, I was fascinated by a story about a sixth-grader from Dorseyville Middle School in Pennsylvania. This little boy figured out that by simply changing the font type used by his school district, the schools could reduce their ink and paper use by 24%. His idea eventually made it to the U.S. government, which would go on to save $136M in paper and ink every year. His small change in design had a huge impact on the environment.
As a product designer, I’m responsible for making sure our products look great, are intuitive, and easily usable and accessible. That includes operations platform, driver and parent apps and most importantly route efficiency especially in optimizing the electric bus fleets. Every day, I try to implement small things—like that sixth-grader’s font idea—that will look and work beautifully, and that will help us conserve resources and respect our planet.
Specifically, as we electrify our fleets, we’ll need to re-imagine how our users engage with Zum efficiently, and design things accordingly. For instance, right now, many of our buses run on diesel fuel. Once our fleets shift to EVs, bus drivers are going to need to return to the bus yard, find the right charger, plug it in, yard operations will have to determine how long the charge will take, if the bus is charging successfully, and when to unplug and return to the road. All of that will require new and intuitive learning experiences.
I’m excited to dive into that challenge, as my way of contributing to how we’re fighting the climate crisis.