Shan-Lyn Ma is Co-founder and CEO of Zola, the wedding company reinventing the wedding planning and registry experience by combining compassionate customer service with modern tools and technology. She also serves as Venture Partner at Female Founders Fund, as a Board Member at Cheetay and as an angel investor. She was born in Singapore and moved to Sydney, Australia, when she was four. There, her dad fought for Southeast Asians’ labor rights at a nonprofit. Her mother was an entrepreneur at heart; in Singapore, she worked as an adviser for a luxury hotel, visiting competitors to find out what was great about them.
Shan-Lyn Ma holds a degree in B-Commerce with First Class Honors from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and an MBA from Stanford University. Ma worked her way through her undergraduate commerce degree with three jobs: pizzeria waitress, econ tutor for high school students, and call-center employee, which taught her a lot about “having to randomly call people and ask them to take a survey.”
After graduation, Ma set her sights on Silicon Valley. She got her MBA at Stanford and worked at Yahoo for two years—even spotting her idol, Jerry Yang, when she was an intern at the company (“I passed him in the hallway. I was so starstruck, I practically stopped in the middle of the hall,” says Ma)
She moved to New York in 2008 to build the product team for a fledging e-commerce startup called Gilt Groupe. There she met her future Zola cofounder and chief design officer, Nobu Nakaguchi, who worked with Ma on building Gilt’s mobile platforms. They dreamed of starting a company and, in 2013, after both had left Gilt, planted the seeds for Zola, recruiting Gilt cofounder Kevin Ryan as the company’s first and sole investor at launch.
Zola launched in 2013 and quickly became the fastest growing wedding company in the country. Today, Zola carries over 500 brands—from registry staples to up-and-coming designers—and over half a million couples have used the platform. The company’s suite of tools includes: the premier all-in-one wedding registry, free wedding websites, a guest-list manager, customizable checklist and beautiful save the dates and wedding invitations. The company has received $140 million in funding, the most recent being $100 million in 2018.
The cofounder and CEO of Zola is using tech to make your big day a little more joyful—and a lot less painful.
In January 2019, Zola opened its first brick-and-mortar location, a pop-up shop in the Flatiron District of New York City. With a valuation of $600 million as of February 2019, Zola is on the path to being a unicorn (a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion). According to The New York Times, "Zola is one of three companies on the list of potential next unicorns that have been fueled by millennials' spending."
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https://www.marieclaire.com/career-advice/a30520753/shan-lyn-ma-zola/