YouSaid · the spoken record

Shan-Lyn Ma

lines on the record: 76
first: 2022-04-18
most recent: 2022-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Think the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that I was born to the parents that I was born to. And then the rest of it was thinking to myself, every day the thing that's going to get me to where I want to go is when I wake up, I work as hard as I possibly can, I go to sleep, I wake up, I do it again the next day. And if I can do that, I'll make myself proud. I'll make my team, my users proud, and ultimately make my daughter proud. And that is what I'm focused on.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is something that is always on my mind and yet I think like many things, something that we cannot and should not rush into. And wherein the fortunate position where we are not forced to make that decision. And so let's build a company that is built to last.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I had a baby girl. She's seven months old. Being a single working mother had given me a whole new level of respect for working parents everywhere. Pretty much every day I think to myself, this feels pretty close to impossible. And yet So many people around the world do it, and most people are not as fortunate as I am in terms of flexibility and support. And so if other people can do it, I can do it too.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have. We are now back in growing the business. We are close to 250 people and continuing to hire. And while I think we are focused on continuing to expand into more and more of the weddings market, we want to continue to keep in mind the lessons that we learn. How can we grow but do it with the right business model?”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I don't know if people want to look back five, ten years from now and think about their most special day being at the airport.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a fantastic year because there was a lot of pent up demand of people who wanted to get married during 2020 that had to reschedule into 2021.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was something we always thought we would do at some point. The company, but it was never the top priority. until the pandemic, until we saw people starting to buy from us. And at that time, I think a lot of people found us. They found us through word of mouth because that's what people were thinking about. They were thinking about their homes.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was interesting was that certainly in the first four, three to four months, there was less wedding gifts being given. Actually, there still was gifting happening, even though the weddings weren't happening. And what 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.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did, and write in the first few weeks of the lockdowns, we had to do a round of layoffs, do a partial furlough, people in the company took pay cuts.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a scary time for us because 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 couples are planning through the Zola platform. And when we had that first week of lockdowns during the pandemic, we could see all these wedding dates suddenly being moved to later in the year. And we had to very quickly move to both support our couples who were all suddenly calling us, asking for our help and support to change their dates, to communicate to their guests. And then we also needed to secure the business and make sure that we could survive the pandemic no matter how long it lasted. And so we shifted both the product roadmaps and the business roadmaps very quickly.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So many celebrities were talking about it, linking to the ad. And while it was a really incredible moment for Zole in terms of awareness, the thing that I am most proud of this entire incident was that the team didn't ask permission to go until the New York Times. They knew that the values of this company, whether we support and embrace all couples, and that, of course, we would agree this was the right thing to do. And of course, we will stand by the value that all love is valid and worth sharing.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By that time, we had been doing TV ads for a number of years and we had always had same-sex couples in all our advertising. So Hallmark said, we're not running these particular ads. And the marketing team, what I am so proud of is that they said that is not okay. That is unacceptable. And they told the New York Times. And through that, it got picked up by many other news outlets, which then snowballed. And it felt like for a moment everyone was talking about this decision. The Kobert show played the entire TV commercial from start to finish.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can now here we've really been led by our couples kind of pulling the company out of us which is they the moment we launched the registry they were saying we love you for registry if I could just add a few more details about my wedding to my page on Zola it could also be my wedding website and then it'd be all there and I'd be done and we kept hearing that again and again it was the number one request And finally, we did it. We launched the wedding website, and it took off immediately, and we thought, wow, that response was so dramatic. We should probably do more products and do it faster this time. And let's go back to the list of requests and see what else the couples are asking us for.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that we actually started fundraising after I came back to work full time. And so I was back in the office. We flew to Silicon Valley, hit Sandhill Road, which is the road where all the VCs are on. And that was actually one of the most fun, fundraising experiences because first and foremost the business was doing really well. So it was fun to get to tell that story. But also it was fun to just be alive and out in the world.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing I did was really during the recovery period when I was in a lot of physical pain and I couldn't really think about work that I needed something to help me get through the day that was not medical. And so started to write in a gratitude journal just really three things that I was grateful for each morning. And then again, at the end of the day before I went to sleep. And it really helped me get through that time. And now anytime I'm going through a challenging period, either at work or elsewhere, I go back to one of the three things I'm really grateful for today. During that time, often a common theme was, I'm grateful to still be alive. And I still feel like that every day.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't imagine. I was thinking about all the things that I had to do when I got back to my computer. And little did I know it would be a long time before I could get back to do those things.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Zol 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, Haven't yet had the chance to experience motherhood, and I really want to. And so I cannot die yet.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Flying home to New York from California and upon landing in New York, I was in a car on the way home from the airport, in a ride-sharing car. And the driver ran a red light Oncoming car smashed into me into the back seat where I was sitting. Very badly injured in eight broken ribs, fractured spine, Broken collarbone, injured lung, liver, bad shape, and was really not able to work for quite some time, for quite a few months after that. And I think every founder thinks to themselves, 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 not one of those situations where I could run the company from my hospital bed. So I was forced to really find out how amazing the team was that we had built. And these near-death experiences.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Judging me. And the company, as a complete failure. When in fact now that I've done this for eight years, I feel very differently about it, which is that investors like everyone else are just doing their job and their job is to be in the business of saying no 99% of the time. And so it's not personal, it's just what they have to do day in and day out. And each time they say no, they are sharing valuable information on why they think the business might not work and so why don't we and I take that information and think about how can we address it in a business so we avoid that issue, but then also how can we adjust our pitch so that next time it is not an issue.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in the world of startups, it sometimes feels like the process of fundraising never ends. Yeah. And that's certainly been true for us. And I think at the beginning, it was particularly stressful because I would take it very personally, every single no was a mortal blow to my heart where I thought they were.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the teenage years where you have enough of a track record where you're making money so you can't just sell the dream. Of what's going to happen, but you're also not yet at maturity where you can show this is already a huge company”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While the series A round was not the hardest round, the harder round was the next round, the series B, where often it is the hardest round for many startups because.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we know that there can be a big company built here. And so the push was really proved to us that this can be the winner.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And I think the way that we thought about it was because we had experience in e-commerce, we could create this business model that was felt like a retail experience. But on the back end was a combination of a retail and a marketplace business model. But at the same time, another comment that I did hear from many investors was, We actually haven't seen a company in the wedding space that is a multi-billion dollar player. And maybe because there hasn't been a big multi-billion dollar company yet, there's just something about this industry that means that there can't be. Which again, it seems crazy because it is a huge market. It's $100 billion market in the US.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there were products that couples were using online to plan their wedding, but we were trying to create a product that was truly all in one place. And what we saw existed was a product that required you still to be sent out to 20 different other sites in order to plan that one day, which was extremely stressful and fragmented for users. And a business model that was primarily driven by advertising. And we saw... On the business side, the opportunity was to create a business that was not reliant on advertising so that we could keep the experience all in one place and build a truly kind of interconnected product.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then Nobu, who has a very innocent mind, Wanted to call the company wish and blow in reference to a wedding cake, which could be taken in all kinds of ways. And so”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was in the months, in the countdown to launching the site, we still didn't have a name yet. We were brainstorming all day, all night. And 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.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it got us to launch, which was around four to six months. We actually raised our Series A round the week before we launched.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it really went to salaries of the first nine employees, which was the size of the team that we had in order to get the product to launch.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the first check was $250,000. So he was the first seed investor, but more importantly, he also joined us as a co-founder and chairman of the board. And so brought not just the cash, but also his experience and advice”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's incredible. But whenever I tell any founder or entrepreneur this story, the response I get is always, wow, that's really lucky you got funding within one second. That was so easy. But actually, it's the exact opposite. It's that Nobu and I worked our guts out 24-7 for four years non-stop to prove to Kevin that we were people worth investing in.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I remember still to this day exactly what he said, which was, oh, I love weddings. I've always wanted to do something in the weddings space. I'll give you the funding and we'll do it together”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were really listening for what are the themes that come up again and again and again in every conversation. 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.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After each conversation, Noble 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.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did what we've always done in any other job or company, which is we spoke to as many people as we could. So, I spent a huge amount of my time tracking down anyone who had just gotten engaged or anyone who had just gone married. If you knew me as a friend, you knew that I wanted to talk to anyone you knew. You guys are engaging.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Nobu I think of as a product design genius in that he can take an idea and bring that idea to life on the screen in a way that you couldn't even have thought of the thing that I would hope he would say I bring is that I enjoy thinking about everything else that goes around the product that has to support that design whether it is Do we need merchandise in that e-commerce store? Okay, what kind of merchandise how are we going to get that merchandise? Let me go out and talk to the brands to get that and so that that together I think is everything you need to build a product.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. And one day Nobu got so upset with how painful it was to work at this coffee table that he snapped. He bought a table from IKEA and that became our working table. And we would take what we sketched on big sheets of paper. We would paste it up on the walls of my living room. It looked like a scene out of homeland, but that was the early months of building the company.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember Novu would come to my apartment in downtown Manhattan. It's a tiny apartment. We're in my living room slash kitchen slash everything room. All I have is a coffee table. So we're working on this coffee table. It's very loaded the ground. It is still my coffee table, by the way. Of course, after a few hours of working and sketching prototypes on this table, our legs would start to get cramp”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While we were developing the idea for Zola, it was really covering our own costs of living. Took a lot of zero interest credit cards out. I think I had a stack of zero interest credit cards. I also had balance transfers that I would transfer from one card to the other. And I do not recommend this to anyone, but that was part of how I paid my bills during that time.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's even more impractical in a wedding registry setting because by nature of a registry, you want to offer a very broad assortment. So you want as many brands and products as possible, but you need very little inventory depth. And so that kind of model is just one that would never have worked from a profitability standpoint.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 retail business model combined with a”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I like to think that we have really contributed to the shift in what is possible. I always remember there was one bride to be who we were showing our wedding registry product to and she started to get tears in her eyes. And she said, Is this possible? Am I even allowed to register for all these things? Am I allowed to create a registry that even looks like this? And that was the aha moment. That was the moment that I knew that this was going to work.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted it to be personal and they wanted it first and foremost to be tied into the rest of their wedding. So they didn't want to have it feel like it was an island, which is what it felt like back then before Zola.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we came to the answer by asking so many different couples, what did they want to see? And what we heard time and time again was couples today, they really wanted to register for not just products, but also experiences And cash and honeymoon funds.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The problem was that it hadn't changed in decades since the 1960s when they were first invented. It was like someone had taken a registry from the 1960s and just put it on the internet and hadn't touched it since. It was like everyone was registering for exactly the same things. It looked the same way. And yet people and couples are so different in terms of what they love, what their passions are that couples today just wanted fundamentally different things. And for me, I was looking at my friends registry, I thought to myself, I know her so well and this just isn't her. It looks like every other registry. It's cold, it's impersonal. And it feels like it was cut from the same cookie cutter mold. And yet if I asked her what she actually wanted, she would give me a list of 100 things that she would love to have”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was complaining to Nobu about how painful this was. And he's married. And so he said, oh, you think as bad as a guest, it was just as bad from my point of view when Ange, his wife and Nobu were getting married, they got into huge fights about their wedding registry and every part of their wedding planning process. And he was complaining about how he had to use 20 different apps and products and services to plan that one day that they nearly got a divorce before they were even married.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted to get her something special that reflected our close friendship, that reflected her passions, and this was not her at all. And so I was so upset that I called her and I said, what is up with your registry? And she said, ugh. It was such a pain to register at all these different stores, I couldn't handle it anymore, so I just told my mother she could do whatever she wanted and I don't even know what's on my registry right now.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the third idea was. And that is what then became the idea of Fizola. Around that time, 2013 was the year that all my friends got married at exactly the same time. And I was going to a wedding every single weekend. And I think we all have this year in our lives. I remember I was complaining to Nobu about one of my friends' wedding registries and she had registered for silver forks and spoons and knives and the only thing that I could afford on her wedding registry was one tiny teaspoon.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So we very quickly moved on from the snacks idea. The second idea that we were exploring in parallel was for an education app that would allow teachers and parents to communicate about The grades of their children. We were interviewing teachers, we were interviewing parents, we were talking to someone who had worked at the Department of Education, trying to understand how it might work. And after a series of interviews, I remember Nobu asking me Are you still interested in this idea? And I said, You know what, I'd have such a big headache thinking about this. I don't know if I can think about this for at least the next seven to ten years of my life.”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we had a whiteboard filled with hundreds of different ideas, and ultimately we kind of filtered the ideas down to three things that we wanted to do more work on to explore. One of the ideas was for a snack delivery service. Because we thought every day people sitting at their desks, you get hungry for snacks around three PM, what if there was snacks that would just magically arrive based on your snack preference at your desk at three PM? Wouldn't that be cool?”
2022-04-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT