The Exchanges

Q to help kind of ease your, your workload, because you had been taking so much on, um, because just six months later, you got in a really bad car accident that would put you out of work for a while. Um, do you, I mean, I don't, I don't want to, you have to relive that, that experience, but do you, can you talk a little bit about what happened?

A Yeah, I was flying home to, in, to New York from California, and upon landing in New York, I was in a car on the way home from the airport, um, in a, you know, ride-sharing car, and the driver ran a red light, and an oncoming car smashed into me into the Backseat where I was sitting. I was, um, very badly injured in, you know, eight broken ribs, fractured spine, um, broken collarbone, injured lung, liver, bad shape, and was really not able to work for quite some time, for, for quite a few months after that. Um, and I think, you know, every founder thinks to themselves, um, What would happen if I wasn't here anymore? What would happen to this business? I actually found out when I got hit by that car. It was, you know, it was not one of those situations where I could run the company from my hospital bed, so I was forced, um, to really find out how amazing the team was that we had built, and these near-death experiences, uh, True reminders of what's important to you, because I remember in the moment that that car hit me, I was in extreme pain, and there were two thoughts that came to mind. The first thought was, Zola is not where it needs to be yet. There's still so much I want to do. There's so much we need to do. I cannot go yet. And the second thought in parallel at the same time was, I haven't yet had the chance to experience motherhood, and I really want to, and so I cannot d…

AI assessment note: “the driver ran a red light, and an oncoming car smashed into me”

Q Yeah, I was checking out the website earlier today. It's super cool. How did it, how did it start? How did, I know you started in 2013, um, and I think at the time you were working at GUILT, which is a, uh, the GUILT group, G-I-L-T, not G-U-I-L-T. Um, tell me how, how this idea came about.

A Well, I had always dreamed about starting my own company one day, but I had never felt ready until really working for many years in product management, which was really working alongside designers and engineers to, uh, Um, build digital websites and mobile apps. And so had gotten that experience. And in 2013, um, that just happened to be the year all my friends got married at exactly the same time. Everyone has that year where you're going to a wedding every weekend, spending a lot of money. I was buying gifts from my friend's wedding registries and found that the experience that I was going through their registry was just one of the worst shopping experiences I had ever seen. I was talking to Nobu, who is my co-founder at Zola, about how painful it was. And he's married, and he was complaining about it. From the couple's perspective, it's just as terrible. And we looked at each other, and we said, you know, we've been working together to build great products. Why don't we attack this ourselves? We think we can do a much better job. And, and that was how Zola was born.

AI assessment note: “found that the experience that I was going through their registry was just one of the worst”

Q So, um, when you were, um, a kid in, in Sydney, were the expectations from your parents pretty high? Did they expect you to, to do well? And was that also an expectation you had of yourself?

A Yeah. They were, uh, I would say, some variation of the stereotype of the Asian tiger parents, but, you know, more than that, I think I remember that my dad wanted me to read great books, and by great books, he meant Homer's The Iliad, and so it was kind of disturbing to him that all I wanted to do was read business books, but That was what led me to, you know, I remember a real turning point for me when I was 11, I entered my very first business plan competition, where students from different schools would all form teams, you would come up with an idea for a business, and for us, we came up with the idea of selling stress balls, where we would put balloons and fill them with Rice. So I would take these stress balls. I would go out in my neighborhood, knock door to door, and sell them every night after I came home from school. I wouldn't go home until I had sold out for the day. And at the end of that competition, we ended up being the company with the most sales in the state. And I was so proud of what I had contributed to that team. And from then on, I was hooked.

AI assessment note: “They were, uh, I would say, some variation of the stereotype of the Asian tiger parents”

Q didn't work. So you knew that there was going to be a challenge in trying to be a retailer, an e-retailer. What, what, how are you going to get around that? Like, how are you going to make your business model work? If you already knew that having a bunch of inventory and then trying to sell it didn't work, or at least didn't work where you, where you'd been.

A What we did was when we were thinking about our business model, we thought about how can we build this in a way that avoids the inventory problem that we had seen, but also allows us to own and manage the customer experience without handing them off to another player where we don't know if that other partner is going to maintain the high level of service that We want to give our couple, and by the way, you know, if we hand the customer off to another partner or retailer or seller through a registry, they might be handed off to five or 20 different sites, and so then it becomes very fragmented and a terrible experience. So what we came up with was, what if this registry was truly a combination of an e-commerce Or, you know, retail business model combined with a dropship model where we don't take inventory, but we ship products directly from the brands to the home.

AI assessment note: “combined with a dropship model where we don't take inventory”

Q were, um, you know, in your kind of early thirties, and had been there for four years, and you are trying to figure out what to do. First question I have for you, before you even came up with an idea for what you wanted to do, did you know that you did not want to do this on your own, that you wanted to do it with a co-founder?

A I had always When I was at Gilt, I was working very closely with Nobu. We were, like, hand-in-hand partners, because we really trusted and loved working with each other. And so, we had always talked about, one day, we should start something together. And actually, it was during the time that, you know, I had left, and Nobu had left Gilt to go and work at a different startup, and We met up for lunch, as friends do, and this is what I now think of as my lunch of a lifetime. We were catching up, and I was, you know, asking Nobu about what he was doing, and he looked at me, and he said, you know, it's good, it's fine, but it's not as good as when we were working together. And I had this realization, and I said to him, you know what, I feel the same way. And we said, we've always talked about starting something. Why don't we just do that? Let's both quit our jobs and start working on the idea that we will then turn into a business and a startup to do together.

AI assessment note: “we had always talked about, one day, we should start something together.”

Q By the way, how did you come up with the name Zola? Because when I first heard, I think of Emil Zola, the, uh, that's, I mean, some of you, I'm going to go there. This is going to sound horribly pretentious. Uh, where, where does the name come from?

A It was in the months, in the countdown to launching the site. Uh, we still didn't have a name yet. We were brainstorming all day, all night, and, um, One of our summer interns was also very passionate about helping us find the right name. So during these brainstorms, he was looking at, how do you say love in different languages? He was looking through the dictionary, he got right to the end to the Z languages, and it turns out in the Zulu language, Zola is the word that roughly translates to love. And so he said, how about Zola? We put it on the whiteboard, we took a vote, and, you know, let me tell you, I'm so glad we picked that name because the runner-up names were terrible.

AI assessment note: “in the Zulu language, Zola is the word that roughly translates to love.”

Q How did you deal with all those calls and emails? Cause you have like 200 employees.

A Yeah, so we very quickly, um, started to put out within our product messages that would help couples based on what we were hearing from them through these calls. So we put on our wedding website product messages that couples could post to all their guests to communicate what was happening with their wedding as a result of COVID- Launched change the date cards so that couples could very easily customize and send change the date cards to all of their guests to get the word out. And then we did invest a lot more in our customer support team. And I've always been proud of the fact we have best in class customer support for our industry. And we wanted to maintain that. And while it definitely wasn't easy. And I know that our customer support team just worked 24, seven to serve our couples. Um, I am proud of the level of service that we helped our couples have through this time.

AI assessment note: “we did invest a lot more in our customer support team.”

Q decisions. 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. I think you introduced wedding cards, maybe photo albums, all last year. Was that all, like, fast-tracked and maybe even introduced because of the pandemic, because you were forced to do it quickly?

A Yes, exactly. I think there were two categories that these things fall into. One category is things that we always wanted to do, and we knew were long-term priorities for us, like the wedding vendor search platform, and we had been building that platform, but twenty-twenty, we thought things are going to accelerate in that people want to plan their weddings increasingly online because they, they can't offline, and so it's important for us to have as robust an offering of As many venues, florists, caterers as possible, because that is what people want to look for right now. Um, and it's also important for all our vendor partners who are small businesses to be getting leads and getting customers during this time when obviously they are hurting as well. So we invested many more people, um, time, attention into building out that vendor search offering than before, and that accelerated. Then the second category is really things that we didn't think we were going to do in 2020, but we kind of pulled up on the road map because we saw the need was there. Uh, so the home store is a great offering, um, example of that where we didn't think the home store was the number one priority initially when we set up in 2020 because there's so much to do in weddings, but of course when people are all at home and they're looking online increasingly for ovens, Bread trays, mattresses, um, and we have…

AI assessment note: “Yes, exactly. I think there were two categories that these things fall into.”

Q And was that palpable, that feeling? I mean, would people kind of, I don't know, quietly talk about that, or, or was it just something, a sense that you think people had, and kind of internalized?

A No, I don't think, I don't think it was a general feeling, because I think the leaders of the company at that time were still people that everyone admired, because they were so talented and brilliant leaders, and the, I think the, the, Challenge that was frustrating to most people was, how do we decide who is responsible for a given decision? Because it has an impact on so many businesses. So, you know, for example, we were talking about, hey, there should be an app for Yahoo Finance, but who's responsible for that, and who makes Is it the Yahoo Finance team? Is it the mobile team? Is it the centralized team? You know, there was just a lot of questions around how do we work together to, to fight this common enemy, and in a small company, you don't have to deal with that, and so I think just the, the innovators dilemma problem was really brought to life, even though so many smart people there were really trying to make it work, and the lesson that I took from that was, That actually, it's never obvious what's going to happen in a business. Even at a big company, it's really incumbent upon the people to act as one team and feel like they're working in a small startup because that's who they're competing with, and that's the only way that you're going to win.

AI assessment note: “No, I don't think, I don't think it was a general feeling”

Q I'm just wondering, how did you use that? How did you, how did you kind of use that data? How did you organize it?

A We would, after each conversation, Nobu and I would go away and talk about what we just learned together. So I think we were really iterating with each conversation in real time. We were really listening for what are the themes that come up again and again and again in every conversation. And it was remarkable how consistent some of these things were. What We heard was couples felt like they were almost like on this whitewater raft being shuffled down the same path as everyone else, where you had to register a certain way, you had to have your wedding invitation look a certain way, and what they were looking for was permission to do the things they actually really wanted and to have a little bit of fun.

AI assessment note: “Nobu and I would go away and talk about what we just learned together”

Q All right. It's probably likely that as more and more of us are vaccinated, that weddings, you know, that, that were kind of put off will start towards the end of this year and really, uh, begin next year. Um, Are weddings going to come back with a force in 2022? Is it going to be this overwhelming deluge of weddings?

A You know, I always rely on the wisdom of crowds to tell me the answer to this question, and luckily what we are seeing in the numbers is absolutely yes. 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. So I think if you were to kind of do a survey of when, based on that, when do people think that they'll be able to have a large wedding ceremony with people in person, It's really starting this fall, um, and we are lucky in that we're in industry where it's not a matter of if weddings, large weddings are going to happen again, it's a matter of when are they going to start happening again, and what I overwhelmingly hear from couples again and again is people really want to have that large party with their family and friends. They, they miss that, uh, and so I don't know if that, you know, is ever going to change. In fact, we are hearing Instances of many venues and vendors booking out very quickly now because the floodgates are open on people feeling more comfortable planning their way.

AI assessment note: “what we are seeing in the numbers is absolutely yes”

Q And look at you now. I mean, you're now a huge player in this industry. Tell me a little bit about the business model. How do you guys make money?

A So we started with one particular business model, um, which I'm proud of in that I think it's very innovative. It is Truly a combination of an e-commerce business and a marketplace business, and what I mean by that is that when we first launched our wedding registry, we wanted to offer products and experiences and the ability for couples to register for whatever they wanted, but we also knew we had to find a way to make money to stay in business, and so what we ended up doing was creating this Marketplace of products and brands that couples wanted, where we could sell them the product through Zola as similar to the way retailers do it, but in a way where we could drop shit the product so we didn't have to buy all the inventory. And if we did have to buy all the inventory for the registry, because it's required such a broad assortment, I think it would have been very hard to make the business model work.

AI assessment note: “creating this Marketplace of products and brands that couples wanted, where we could sell”