How BusRight transitioned out of founder-led sales at $1M ARR | Keith Corso

**Keith Corso** (0:00)
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?

**Brett** (0:13)
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 into today's episode.
Today we're speaking with Keith Corso, co-founder and CEO of BusRight. Keith, welcome to the show.

**Keith Corso** (0:52)
Thanks so much, Brett. I know we had connected in 2022, so it's good to finally put a face to it and make this happen.

**Brett** (0:58)
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?

**Keith Corso** (1:05)
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 out during Covid that I found and read proudly. And she is the inspiration for what is now BusRight, but that's a whole much longer story.

**Brett** (1:23)
And what does BusRight do? 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?

**Keith Corso** (1:30)
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.

**Brett** (1:47)
One thing I like to do is just nerd out on different industries. And I've 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?

**Keith Corso** (2:04)
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 10-15 percent fewer drivers than they need, you can no longer rely on these outdated inefficient paper route sheets that are static.
That's number one. Number two, when we started BusRight, it was illegal to put tablets on school buses. 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 and 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 public education every day in the United States alone. And those are a few that I will leave you with.

**Brett** (3:17)
Why are tablets illegal? I'm sure there's an obvious reason, but like, why?

**Keith Corso** (3:21)
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, BusRight 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 bringing that to light and helping turn the narrative around.

**Brett** (3:48)
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 there was going to be illegal what you were trying to do?

**Keith Corso** (3:57)
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. 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.