Disrupting the wedding industry, with Zola’s Shan-Lyn Ma

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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Two of my very good friends.

met each other and fell in love at the French laundry. Working for Thomas Keller. The French Laundry is a world renowned restaurant in California's Napa Valley, operated by Chef Thomas Keller. And that's Shan Lin Ma, who, as founder of the wedding business Zola. May know more stories about romantic couples than anyone you know.

So of course when it came time to decide where to have the wedding, they had their wedding at the French laundry. But it wasn't the most memorable wedding because of that. Although of course the food and the destination was incredible. I would say it was because the after party was at a dive bar down the street. where typically the bride and groom enter in some dramatic, romantic, beautiful way, and they enter the dive bar. falling on top of each other, literally. Because perhaps the wine was was a bit too excessive at the wedding. But it was just that combination of going from one extreme to the other.

that showed that no matter where you are, there's a lot of love both in this couple, in this wedding, and everyone around them. And so it was an incredibly fun special wedding and one of those that sparked the idea for Zola. Early in her career, Shan honed her product in e commerce skills with tech juggernauts. Like Yahoo in guilt. Now as co CEO and co founder of the online wedding planner Zola.

She's helped over two milli couples start their lives together. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is truly gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.

This is masters of scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. In this episode, Zola's Shanlin Ma shares lessons about how intrapreneurship prepared her for striking out on her own, finding clarity in a personal crisis, and weathering pandemic level disruptions to her business. But first I wanted to talk to Shan about the earliest inspiration of her entrepreneurial story.

Shen welcome to Masters of Scale. Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled for you to be here. A lot of the masters of scale we have on the show started their entrepreneurial journeys early. How did you get the bug? How did you get started as an entrepreneur? Well, I have wanted to be an entrepreneur before I even knew the word existed. Yeah, I was born in Singapore, but grew up in Australia where my family moved when I was four. And I think very early on realized You know, any money that my parents had, which wasn't a lot, went to school and books and

Not not much else. And so anything else that I wanted, I had to earn for myself. And so very early on, kind of learnt or caught the bug, I should say, of Creating something out of nothing. And that is truly addictive. And not just the fact that you get to earn something, but the fact that you created something out of nothing. I think that is still the most fulfilling part of my job. I grew up mostly with posters of athletes on my wall, including a famous poster of a basketball player named Darryl Griffith whose nickname was Dr. Dunkenstein. I still remember that poster on my wall. You grew up with a very different kind of hero on a poster on your wall. Who was on your wall?

Well, uh yeah, there's two very different people on my wall. So one was Kylie Minogue. Uhhuh. Okay. Who I Wanted to be like. The other person was Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo, who I also wanted to be like. So how does Jerry Yang end up on your wall as a young woman with the entrepreneurial bug in Australia? You know, Australia is a very remote country in that it's literally on the other side of the world from the US and surrounded by water. So my window was really magazines with which it ended up being business magazines, which was what the library had at the time. And so I would read about all the exciting things that were happening in the world. And This story of Yahoo was one that really caught my imagination. Here was this

young person right out of school who was finding a way to Democratize information and make it accessible to everyone. And by the way, he did it in a very fun Yeah, down to earth way. And he also looks like me. It made me feel like that was something that I would like to do one day.

Shan was laser focused on getting to Silicon Valley. So when she had the opportunity, she enrolled in the MBA program at Stanford. Soon after she got an internship at Yahoo. And then a full time job. The man on the poster in her childhood bedroom was now signing her checks.

Yeah. So many things I learned at Yahoo, but the most exciting moment for me was when I walked past Jerry Yang in the hall. Did you get to tell him about him being in social media? Obviously I was too stunned and shocked and starstrucked and so He was very busy, clearly, very stressed. A lot of things going on at that time in Yahoo, but I walked past him and then I think I just stopped in my tracks and maybe had a small panic attack. Oh have you had a chance to talk to him since? I have, I have. It was incredible. I think he was everything that I imagined he would be in terms of kind, humble, obviously extremely smart and so I lucky to

have had the opportunity to meet him. And you know, part of what gets me up every day is the motivation to be able to show Jerry that I can one day write to him again and say, look at the things I've done. I hope you are proud and what you've inspired. About a decade into her career, Shan landed what became a transformational role at the website Gilt. For those people who might not be familiar, Gilt was one of the earliest, I would say web point two startups based in New York. It was at the forefront of a new wave of e-commerce and shopping experiences, both on the web and on mobile. I came across Gilt at first as a early customer. I was looking and I thought wow, I can't stop.

Coming to this site, there's something special happening. I saw the team page. I thought these are people I would love to work with and learn from. was lucky enough to get the job as the first product manager there. I feel like that was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It gave me the opportunity to have a seat on the rocket ship, which I think is you know a phrase that Shell Sandbird coined where It was

About thirty people at the time, and you know, four years later, over a thousand people. It was doing close to zero in revenue at the time. Four years later, over 600 million in revenue. And so I got to have a front seat on developing all the new products that would drive that expansion. Because when you're in a such a fast growing company, there's a lot of opportunities to do things you would never be able to do otherwise. Including coming up with ideas. And having the chance to do them if they're good ideas. So having taken those lessons from Yahoo through guilt

Where did the idea for Zola come from? It was really born out of personal need. So twenty thirteen, which was the year we started Zola, that was the year all my friends were getting married at the same time. And I think many people have that year where every weekend you're going to a different wedding. You are spending a lot of money. Doing a lot of travel, buying a lot of gifts. I was buying a lot of gifts from my friends from their wedding registries.

And I distinctly remember there was one friend where the only thing I could afford on her registry was one silver spoon. And I called her up and I said, What is going on with your registry? And she said, Oh man, I don't even know. It was so frustrating to put together. I just let my mother deal with it. I don't even know what's on there. It's the whole thing is just so painful and horrible. And that kind of set up a light bulb because here I had been working in creating.

Simple fast fun e commerce shopping experiences. And suddenly I was faced with one that was the worst shopping experience I'd ever seen online. And so I started talking to Nobu, who is my co-founder here at Zola, and we had been working together for a long time. And I was saying This is kind of crazy. It's like Stuck in the nineteen hundreds.

And you know, our friends deserve better and nobody's married. And he said, Oh, it's just as bad for guests, but also for couples. Everything that you have to do to set up a registry is one of the worst parts of getting married. we heard again and again was that people wanted fundamentally different things than what they were getting from department store registries, which dominated the market at the time. They wanted to fully personalize their registry and their entire wedding. And they just wanted the convenience of Managing things where and when they wanted them.

And no one else was doing that. And we thought we have been doing that just at a different company. And we can bring very kind of unique Insights. to this problem, and we kind of looked at each other and we said, we should do something about that. And that was the beginning of Zola. So almost every company when they start out, they get some things really right, they get some things really wrong. What did you get right and what did you get wrong at the beginning? So my co-founder Nobu and I are very much product people. We are focused on the customer, the couple, and we believe the best product always wins. And so I think what we got right was laser focusing on how can we design and build the best possible product for our couples.

And we also didn't want to distract ourselves with doing a lot of different products or features until we felt like we had really nailed the first one, which was the wedding registry. Now I think what we got wrong was that maybe we waited a a little too long. To respond to couples' requests to expand beyond wedding registry. We spent the first four years on that one product, but we heard from day one of launch. Oh, could you please help me with this in My wooden planning could you

Also, help me with my wedding website because my registry already has all my information. If I could just add a few more things, it could all be in one place. If I could do it all over again, I would react faster to those couple requests. But there's a tension, right? Because you wanna nail the one thing. You wanna get it really right before you start expanding. And yet if you're not serving your customers' broader needs, you risk losing them to competitors. Exactly. So when other entrepreneurs are coming to you and they're asking about this, how do you advise them about when to branch out into those next product lines? when you can start to see both in your product feedback And in your P L.

That you have that word of mouth going, that you have that viral network effect, which is inherent in weddings. But once you see that. That is the time where you can continue to invest in that core product, but also consider Oh, and there are the things that we can then add on that are accelerated by that word of mouth. Mm-hmm.

Talk about your fundraising journey, if you would. When did you decide to go talk to investors and how did they respond when you brought Zola to them? So I always tell any founder or aspiring entrepreneur that Every fundraising journey is completely different to anyone else's and owls fits that exactly.

So Nobu and I once we had quit our jobs and started working on Zola We started talking to Kevin Ryan, who is we knew very well from Guilt. He is you know well known. Founder, investor, entrepreneur. Kevin Ryan is indeed the founder of Guilt, among many other New York based startups. He's often called the godfather of NYC tech.

And because we worked with him for so long, we were just used to kind of sharing ideas, getting feedback on those ideas, hearing his thoughts. I still remember his words to this day, which is I've always wanted to do something in weddings. Love to work with you guys again. Why don't I just give you the funding? And we'll do it together. Yeah. That sounds like a dream. Problem solved. Every single founder I talk to says, Wow, that was the easiest fundraise I've ever heard. And in many ways it was the quickest fundraising story, but I consider it more as

One of the longest running fundraising stories in that Nobu and I worked with and for Kevin at Guilt for four years. Yeah, we worked our butts off. Twenty-four seven. To really show that we were people worth investing in again. And it was only because of that history of the track record. A performance that Kevin had the confidence to say Let me do your seed round.

And we will offer. From there. The week before we were about to launch, I remember we started to get outreach from investors who were interested in meeting us to hear what we were working on. And once we showed them the product that we were about to launch, they sent us a term sheet. The same day.

And so again, it was a matter of wow, that seems really easy. But in fact, it was all the work that we had put into developing the product that we were about to launch that made them want to invest. No. I wish every round was as easy as that, and it certainly has not been as easy as that. What's gotten harder? Well, I would say once you start to drive revenue, have real metrics, of course The fundraising pictures shift from being all about the dream.

And the vision and that market opportunity to being about What has the business done? What is it going to do? And how much money is this going to earn me? There are some years where It's very easy to tell that story, and then there are other years where you see The revenue is coming.

But it's just not immediately apparent on the books. And those are tough for fundraisers. And we've certainly had those. So you know what I will tell Anyone who is kind of experiencing a tougher fundraise. is that you just keep going until you can't anymore. Yeah. I mean this is one of the paradoxes, right? It's like if you're pre-product, it's all on the promise of the product. If you're pre-revenue, it's all on the promise of the revenue. If you're revenue, it's on the revenue, but like if you're in growth mode, they're less focused on the bottom line. Once you're getting close to profitability, now they're focused on it's the goalposts move as you move down the fundraising field and it can get harder.

Y you all made a decision early on to be inclusive of same sex couples. What was that decision like for you all? Was that something that required a lot of discussion? Was that an obvious thing? Was that something investors were worried about or in favor of? You know, it wasn't even a a decision or a discussion. It was something so obvious. That it was offensive to us that no other wedding company was being inclusive of Any type of couple. The default was always what's the bride's name, what's the groom's name. The default was, oh, it must be a bride and a groom. It was quite frankly offensive that that was even still in existence. True. You know, we thought well

Why don't we ask? We say who is getting married here? And then we change the experience that we're showing to someone to reflect what people have told us. And I I cannot even describe the outpouring of love and messages that we received when couple said, you know, it made me cry when you showed me a groom and a groom's picture, um, because no one else has. And it kind of helps us know we were on the right track and we need to do it everywhere we possibly can. Show that we for all couples, not just in the product, but in our marketing, in customer support, every single place that we can.

Has there been negative feedback for that? There was one instance where The whole map channel. refuse to run our ads that showed same sex couples. Do you remember what year this was?

I think it was around Win nineteen. Oh wow. Not the eighteen hundreds. Right. Um and this you know, at this point we have been

running ads with same sex couples on different platforms for years. And Yeah, thought nothing of it. And you know, it's just it's just the way that we operate. But this was the first time that someone said, No, we're we're gonna run these three ads, but we're not gonna run these three ads. At first we didn't understand why. And then we looked at the ads and the only thing that was different was The ads that were rejected.

featured same sex couples. So we ask, you know, is that the reason? And the answer was yes. And the thing one of the things I'm most proud of in Zola's history is that the marketing team knew that was not okay. They knew that it was unacceptable. Yeah. And that Yeah, Zola is a company. would reject that answer.

And so they told people. They told The press and it was an important moment for us because by standing up for Yeah, what what is very core to the company. We showed our couples and prospective couples, everyone who we are, and it ended up attracting Love not just from couples, but also from our team.

who said, Thank you for doing that. I wanna work here. I wanna continue working here because of this. Still ahead, we'll hear how Shan survived a major crisis in her personal life. That brought clarity to her business. Plus, she'll share insights on navigating the most stressful period in the history of the wedding industry. The pandemic.

Stay with us. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and others like it on our YouTube channel. I wanna just take a half step back because a few years into the Zola journey, you I believe were in an accident.

Can you tell us about what happened? Yeah, so I was Coming back from California where I ha was speaking at a conference and I was in a ride sharing service.

On the way home. When all of a sudden the driver ran a red light and was a car slammed into me. And in that millisecond of extreme pain, I r remember the exact thoughts that went through my mind, which were, one, this is it. I'm dying. It's all over.

And two. I'm not done yet. I cannot die today. I'm not. Ready. specifically the two things that I thought I need to get these done first.

One was I would like to have a child. And then the second is I need to get Zola to where I know it can be to fulfill this potential of this company. And While what happened after that was

something that I would not wish on anyone when it comes to the n amount of broken bones and pain and recovery and trauma. The way that I was able to get through that was To think about Well, I know now. It's very clear to me. the things that I really do want to do. And Sometimes as a founder, when you've been working on a business for a while, you start to think

Would I like to do something else? And that moment was very clarifying for me because the answer came back very clearly. No, this is what I need and want to do. Every single day and and so You know, ever since then I feel like Might personal mission is very clear and

And you know, every day I need to continue to push Zola to where I know it can get. between that accident and today. We had a little pandemic. We had a little once in a century event, which for some businesses, Peloton you pulled their business forward incredibly. But you're running a business that supports people gathering in person. So I wanna go back to March of twenty twenty. What was it like being at Zola then and how did you manage through especially those first few months of the pandemic?

One of the reasons That we were so excited to do something in the weddings space in the first place was because when we looked at Decades and decades of history we saw The number of people that get married every year is remarkably consistent through depressions, through boom times, no matter what the decade, it's a very consistent number every single year, even as you know, the culture changes.

People still want to get married. Except for when there's a pandemic. And no you're not allowed to leave your house. And that was probably the darkest year for the weddings industry overall. Certainly for us, we could see very quickly as couples were moving the wedding dates on The wedding websites with Zola We had kind of three

things that we knew we had to do and we thought, Okay, this is clearly Going to be a make or break year for or month for us. What are the things we need to figure out? The first was

How can we support our couples who are clearly going to be in a lot of pain because they don't know what's going on, they don't know what to do, they in some cases have put down large deposits. And so We started building products and features that would support couples during that time specifically. Can you say more about that? I mean, so I've got a venue booked, I've got a honeymoon planned, I've got guests coming in, all of it, and all of a sudden the world is shut down. So what are the tools you're giving people to manage that? So we started talking about you might want to change your date. You might want to change that booking. And what are the ways we can support you to do that? Well, you know, here's exactly how you do it via your wedding website and other Zola products. Here's how you message that to your guests in a way that

Hopefully people can really hear. And then for those that have bought say the dates or wedding invitations with us, let us help you send out free change the date cards. And so that was the kind of Okay, maybe you just really want to get married on that same day. So here's a virtual weddings feature that we put up very quickly. And then here's some other vendor recommendations of things that might be more supportive of the type of wedding that you might want to have now or later on, potentially with less people. And in the meantime, your own team

You're not gathering in the office at that point. So You're figuring this out for your customers at the same time, you're figuring out how to lead a team that is all of a sudden working from a home. Uh how'd you do it? So I would say that we made the decision to focus on two things. That I think helps.

limit the distraction and the what we call doom spiraling that one could have gone into mentally. And I think the first was Let's start to build out scenarios of what could happen. So we had a what happens if the pandemic lasts three months, what happens if the pandemic lasts six months, and Let's not even imagine what happens if the pandemic last the last nine months and that then helped us create Some very quick decisions around things we needed to stop and start doing. So for example,

Up until that point, we had also heard feedback from couples and started to see in our data a lot of people are buying from their home because the home category at that point was booming. And so we very quickly launched Zola Home, which is essentially a kind of home. website where you could buy anything you need for your home. And that was one of the things that helped us

get through that year. And then of course The following two years were the biggest years ever of for weddings where a lot of people who might have pushed their wedding back or pulled their wedding forward, decided we are gonna celebrate. being back in person again and we're gonna have a really big wedding.

So as we sit here in twenty twenty four, you added Zola home in the pandemic. You had this experience at guilt of beginning to expand into new business lines and what have you. As you look at growth ahead for Zola, what's next? Well, there's still first of all a lot to do in weddings. So we will continue to grow and build upon the wedding's product portfolio that we have. But We're excited about.

being a life stage company and thinking about You know, couples once they get married. They still actually do come back to Zola. They still kind of ask us to help them with more things that they think we're well suited to do. And so our recent launch of Zola Baby is a good example of that, where actually from probably the first day we launched Zola, we also heard requests for Oh, can I use this for my baby registry and It took us ten years, but

we finally decided it was time to do that. And so that now I think kind of s puts us into the we serve you from engagement through this entire life stage of really kind of growing up. creating a family are the parts of this life stage. It's everything to do with a couple and their relationship together. And how can we best support that? What is a a non-obvious unusual wedding gift that you saw or that you've given or that you've like what's one thing that people should think about giving as a wedding gift that they might not otherwise think about? Every registry Towards the end, there's a bunch of things that people

Aren't as excited by And one of those things is A Dyson Vacuum Cleaner. Yeah. And I you know, as a guest, I understand I don't really want to gift a vacuum cleaner either. It's not one thing that you want to walk into someone's house and say, Oh, I feel so great because I gave you that vacuum cleaner. But you know, every couple always says, I really hope someone gets me that vacuum cleaner because I've always wanted a Dyson, but I've never wanted to spend that for myself. But I would

Love to get it. Well, James Dyson was a guest recently and not a sponsor of the show this week, but we're we'll be very happy to know that the Dyson vacuum cleaner should be the number one item that people buy or contribute to buying for their friends for getting married. I love that. And we've entered this world of AI and you all launched a split the decisions tool. Can you tell us about that?

What we heard consistently from Couples mostly heard from brides is that there's one person that does all the work in putting together a wedding and they really wish it was more fairly distributed. And so we put together this tool that asks you a few questions such as what are you each strong at? What are you interested in? And then kind of divides up what are the responsibilities that you can both take on in planning this wedding together because you're getting married together. It was a something that was like started as a fun idea, but we've really been surprised at how many people have embraced, tried it out, and continue to see a lot of positive feedback on that. And then the other thing that also we launched was A thank you note generator. Because one of the most painful things about

After you get married, is that you have to send a lot of thank yous to people who came to the wedding, gave you a gift, and we thought, Well, this is something that is very easy to generate if you know who gave you which gifts and you know their contact information and if you know you can as a couple put in like what kind of tone you might want that thank you note in. And you know now we can just help you generate that. And then you can imagine over time just Click a button, send the note, and you're done. Yeah. Tons of applications. What's your favorite thing about what you do? It's still The thing that I started doing when I was very young, which is

Working with a group of smart, fun people to think about new ideas that will make Other people happy. working on getting that idea out into the world and then seeing if people Actually, want to use it and love it. And there is nothing as satisfying as when someone who used Zola comes up to me.

And shakes me by the shoulders and says You don't understand how much I love Zola. I love Zola. I say, Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. And they say, No, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. I love it. And that passion is what I'm always looking for for anything that we do. Because it means that

We have done something truly. Different. Still the moments I live for. Well, that's a wonderful place to bring the conversation to a close. Thank you for being with us. Zola has built a better experience for millions of people around a key milestone in their lives. And Shan's commitment and clarity in the face of crisis continue to fuel Zola's growth.

And if that isn't something worth raising a glass to, I don't know what is. I'm Jeff Berman. Thanks for listening. Masters of Scales await what original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro.

Our senior producer is Trisha Bobida. The production team includes Tucker Legersy, Masha Makatanina, Brandon Klein, Timothy Lou Lee. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli and Brian Pew. Original music by Ryan Holiday.

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