🚌  Uber for school buses

👋  Good morning, but also goodnight, apparently? Talker Research surveyed 2k Americans about their energy levels and, on average, respondents said they’re fading for the day starting a little before 3pm. A not-insignificant chunk of people (21%) reported that they start to crater before noon. Congrats to energy drink brands on their comfortable future making billions despite tasting like car parts. 

NEWS FLASH 

🪥  Say ahh! Dyson’s newest product, the CameraJet, is a $500 toothbrush that flosses for you. The brush head houses a tiny camera that live-streams the inside of your mouth to your phone and uses AI to detect gaps between your teeth, blasting them automatically with mouthwash — no floss required. Sounds thrilling, expensive, and a little odd.

🍦  This next Blizzard’s gonna be extra chilly... because in Shanghai, there’s now a Dairy Queen run only by cold, cold robot hands. In tandem with sharing that it raised nearly $670m, AI robotics startup Sharpa opened a DQ franchise operated exclusively by its humanoid robots. And yes, they’ll do the signature turn-the-Blizzard-upside-down move.

💊  Oh, your medicine hasn’t been to space? Embarrassing: Startup Eascra Biotech picked up an $8m award from NASA to give everything in your medicine cabinet a serious inferiority complex — Eascra is working to manufacture meds in low orbit. Space-enabled medicine offers a faster, gravity-free testing environment and an easier path to making nanoparticles that can travel deeper into our bodies. Your ibuprofen could never.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Every company is a media company now… even the Chicago Cubs. The baseball team will debut its first scripted rom-com on Sept. 4, a 17-episode, straight-to-TikTok release about a couple falling for each other in the bleachers.

• A rook-y move: Chess.com has diversified away from just chess, with a poker spin-off called Gambit. The site’s 275m+ chess players will recognize hapless CPU opponent Martin, but they can’t take his money — Gambit is explicitly anti-gambling. 

  
  

• RIP, Little Blue Menu: Chick-fil-A is shuttering its experimental delivery-centric restaurant concept after five years. Little Blue Menu’s demise is rare in that everything else the ever-growing fast-food chain has touched in recent years has turned to gold.
  

• Obsession really did a number on Hollywood: AMC Entertainment now wants more indie films in its theaters. It's launching its own distribution company, Leawood Films, that’ll scour film festivals for smaller, filmmaker-funded pictures. 
  

AGE OF SUCCESS 

Overnight success = BS

Our founder Sam Parr doesn't believe in overnight success.

He thinks it's complete nonsense, actually.

So he spent years tracking founders and icons — when they started, when the world noticed, and how long the grind really was.

The average: 8.2 years of quiet work before the breakthrough.

Oh, and the magic age where things seem to click is 27. Make of that what you will.

Grab the database

THE BIG IDEA

The startup fixing America's broken school bus system

If we learned anything from seminal '90s hip-hop group Kriss Kross, it's that missing the bus is something you never, ever want to do.

Yet, missing the bus is a real problem for students across America, thanks to a severe shortage of school bus drivers.

Rather than sit idly at the bus stop, eBay exec-turned-entrepreneur Ritu Narayan founded Zum, the "Uber for school buses." The $1.7B company is transforming a tangled mess of driver shortages and complicated state-by-state bus systems into a streamlined, 21st-century service to safely and efficiently transport students, per Forbes.

Get on the bus

America spends nearly $40B/year on school transportation, a hefty price for a sprawling patchwork that hasn't evolved much:

• 480k school buses provide daily transport
  
• 53% of students take school buses
  
• 26m school children ride buses 2x/day
  
• Buses are considered ~9x safer than passenger vehicles

While the scale is impressive, many students rely on parents, guardians, or public transit to attend school. Those numbers are increasing as schools struggle with driver shortages, budget constraints, and rising fuel prices.

Driver employment is now 9.5% lower than in 2019, and those shortages have consequences for students, parents, and educators:

• 75% of schools say transportation access affects chronic absenteeism.
  
• Unreliable transportation can affect academic outcomes.
  
• 35% of parents missed work, and 11% lost jobs due to school transportation needs.
  
• 83% of schools report that educators help cover transportation needs.

Enter Zum

Struggling with reliable transportation for her own kids, Narayan launched Liftee, a ride-sharing service with added security. But the service couldn't scale.

She pivoted to Zum, a district-wide platform that coordinates fleets of school buses faster and more efficiently than traditional models.

• Zum buys buses, which connect to an app that allows dispatchers, parents, and teachers to track routes.
  
• AI analyzes routes to save time, miles, and money, reducing the number of buses needed.
  
• It offers drivers competitive rates (starting at $30/hour) plus benefits, and utilizes electric buses, which also help shore up power grids.
  
• 5k schools in 18 states pay for the service.

Zum's long-term contracts appeal to investors:

• $430m in funding raised
  
• $333m in 2025 revenue, up 35% from 2024

While there have been hiccups, Zum has helped districts eliminate driver shortages.

For students, Zum offers reliability and air conditioning — reason alone to jump ... jump.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

AI bubble this, AI bubble that… What happens if this thing actually pops?

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Proportion of Americans’ downtime that’s spent stressing out about productivity rather than actually resting or relaxing, according to a new study. Over the course of a week, researchers found participants were engaging in leisurely activities 57% of the time they checked in on them, but spending one in seven moments that should’ve been fun feeling bad about not getting more done (whatever that means).

According to psychologist Adam Grant, that’s dumb. Grant says leisure guilt robs people of “joy and rejuvenation” and that leisure time, which can reduce the risk of depression and increase your chances of getting a promotion, is “not a bug,” but “a feature of a good life,” per Inc.

So, great — now you can feel guilty about feeling guilty for trying to chill.

HOW YOU HUSTLE 

Our readers are always up to neat things. Here's our weekly feature highlighting one of your ventures.

Founder: Tayler Moore

Building: Brra — invisible thermal regulation designed for the 1.2B women expected to move through menopause by 2030, roughly 80% of whom will experience hot flashes and sudden overheating.

Edge: Brra's goal is to keep women present and uninterrupted when their bodies heat up, no fan or ice pack required.

Advice: "Find the person who has the problem, put something imperfect in front of them, and pay attention to what they actually do. Not what they say to be polite."

Working on something cool? Tell us here.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1969, America’s first ATM started dispensing cash in Rockville Centre, New York. ATM fees didn’t go mainstream until the 1990s.

🙅  Game: Opposite Wordle, where the goal is to not guess the right word.

📸  That’s cool: Learn more about the first-ever selfie, taken nearly 200 years ago.

🤯  Whoa: The very first social network was started in… 1971?!

🐶  Aww: Puppy on a skateboard.

SHOWER THOUGHT

It's kind of weird that we just squeeze cows and then pour that on our cereal.  SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley, Singdhi Sokpo, and Danny Jensen.

Editing by: Sara "Who’s driving this thing?" Friedman.

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