Smarter campus transportation
Zen Shuttles
A campus ride-pooling service that coordinated riders, drivers, schedules, and real-time operations around Arizona State University; reached break-even in 15 months and secured $31K across four ASU venture awards.
- Role
- Founder and CTO
- Period
- May 2022 — Dec 2023
- Based
- Tempe, AZ
The challenge
A real system, not a demo.
Campus trips are short, demand arrives in clusters, vehicle capacity is limited, and riders still expect predictable ETAs. The product had to coordinate all of it with a tiny team.
My contribution
Product thinking through production engineering.
I co-founded Zen and owned product and engineering end to end: rider and driver apps, dispatch, payments, promotions, internal operations, analytics, and production delivery.
- 15 mo
- to break-even
- $31K
- across four ASU venture awards
- 1st
- Tech Devils Pitch Showcase
- 3
- production applications
Recognition
$31K across four ASU venture awards.
ASU eSeed Challenge
Two awards: $8K and $17K
ASU sourceASU Venture Development Grant
Venture development grant
ASU sourceHool Coury Law Tech Venture Challenge
Pitch competition award
ASU source
What shipped
The work behind the outcomes.
- Built and launched rider and driver applications plus a real-time operations dashboard.
- Designed the dispatch and scheduling engine to group nearby demand, enforce capacity, and deliver routes and ETAs to drivers.
- Reduced Maps and Places API usage through autocomplete caching, session tokens, and elimination of redundant route requests.
- Shipped memberships, payments, referrals, promotions, push messaging, and ride, driver, customer, and revenue analytics.
Selected systems
Tools in service of the product.
- React Native
- React
- Firebase
- Stripe
- Google Cloud
- Twilio
- Reanimated
Go deeper