Zola, every mention
34 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Zola
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Guy Raz 62Shan-Lyn Ma 26
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Zola comes up
Advice Line with Jack Conte of Patreon
Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma
- ▶ 0:04 Shan-Lyn Ma It turns out in the Zulu language, Zola is the word that roughly translates to love. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:02 Guy Raz I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Shanlin Ma took everything she knew about how not to run an online business and launched Zola, one of the most popular wedding planning sites in the U.S.
- ▶ 3:42 Guy Raz And from that insight, she and her co-founder, Nobu Nakaguchi, built Zola. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:53 Guy Raz While you were at Gilt, um, you met, um, somebody there who would become a hugely important person in your life, Nobu Nakaguchi, who is your co-founder, uh, at Zola, which we'll talk about Zola in a bit, but tell me about Nobu. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:19 Guy Raz When we come back in just a moment, how Shan and Nobu started Zola using the lessons they learned from other companies' mistakes, and how they discovered that every happy couple is unhappy about their wedding in basically the same way.
- ▶ 28:18 Shan-Lyn Ma So the third idea was in the wedding space, and that is what then became the idea for Zola.
- ▶ 31:40 Guy Raz Like if I was going to Zola, if I said, okay, Shan, tell me what I would get out of this thing. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:07 Shan-Lyn Ma You know, while we were developing the idea for Zola, it was really, um, covering our own costs of living. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 40:44 Guy Raz So, I, I read that one of the things that you did, that the two of you did while you were building Zola was, very smartly,
- ▶ 43:00 Guy Raz By the way, how did you come up with the name Zola? 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 50:26 Guy Raz Is she, she's still, um, at Zola? 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 53:02 Guy Raz When we come back in just a moment, how Shan gets through months of painful recovery, and then has to deal with yet another big blow to the company, the year when in-person weddings pretty much disappear.
- ▶ 55:49 Guy Raz So during that time, the company had to function without you. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 57:29 Shan-Lyn Ma Here we've really been led by our couples kind of pulling the company out of us, which is they, at the moment we launched the registry, they were saying, we love you for registry. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 58:14 Guy Raz Alright, so you, I think by, by 2019, you, you guys were, or maybe even 2018, um, you were, you, you were the third most visited wedding site in the U.S., so you were clearly on the right track, um, and later that year, you, um, put some… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:00:58 Shan-Lyn Ma Yeah, it was a scary time for us because, you know, one of the things we've always had is great visibility into what's going to happen in a business because we can see in aggregate all the wedding dates that hundreds of thousands of… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:02:49 Shan-Lyn Ma Also helped us during that time was that we launched our home store because we saw a lot of people coming to buy from Zola who weren't getting married because, of course, everyone was at home and buying things for their home. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:05:26 Shan-Lyn Ma We have. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:06:03 Guy Raz One is Zola is not where it needs to be, and two, I want to be a mother. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:07:57 Guy Raz When you think about your journey from like, you know, kid in Australia to here you are, you're running a company value of over six hundred million dollars, probably more. 3 times in the scene
Meet The HIBT Fellows: Kaitlin McGreyes & Nicole Argüelles
How I Built Resilience: Shan-Lyn Ma of Zola
- ▶ 0:51 Guy Raz And today, my conversation with Shanlin Ma, CEO and co-founder of Zola. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:04 Shan-Lyn Ma I was talking to Nobu, who is my co-founder at Zola, about how painful it was. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:11 Guy Raz For what is now Zola, and you started to talk to people about it.
- ▶ 6:24 Guy Raz I mean, you're now a huge player in this industry. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:59 Shan-Lyn Ma So at the start of twenty-twenty, we could forecast, oh, twenty-twenty is going to be a great year because we have so many more people married with Zola than the previous year.
- ▶ 13:02 Guy Raz In a moment, more from Shanlin Ma about how Zola and the entire wedding industry had to pivot due to the pandemic, and her predictions for the future of weddings. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:58 Guy Raz Big decisions about pivoting, about what things you could do, and I know you guys introduced a bunch of stuff last year, a wedding vendor search platform, Zola Home, where you're selling furniture and home goods. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:57 Shan-Lyn Ma We saw in our data people very quickly turning to Zola to buy things for their home, even though it was very hard to do. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:54 Guy Raz And you guys basically started, created a platform to enable Zoom weddings, and I read that you hosted, like, 5000 wedding events last year. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:31 Shan-Lyn Ma Uh, we see at least, you know, couples planning their wedding on Zola, that their wedding dates are really growing in a huge way, um, starting this fall. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:39 Guy Raz Shanlin Ma, co-founder of Zola.
- ▶ 26:46 Guy Raz That's an excerpt from my live conversation with Shanlin Ma, co-founder of Zola.